Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction
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Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction
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Overview
Among the writers Klinkowitz discusses are Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Max Apple, Saul Bellow, Erica Jong, Susan Quist, Gerald Rosen, Rob Swigart, and Grace Paley. He shows how, in the absence of subject matter, these writers persist in the act of structuring—by organizing autobiography as a narrative device, ritualizing national history and popular culture, or formalizing a comic response to a new imaginative state, the state of California. Klinkowitz also considers subjects such as gender and war, which, though they cannot be represented, nevertheless exercise contraints on a writer’s intention to structure.
What emerges from Klinkowitz’s analysis is a clear sense of what today’s fiction—and fiction writing—is about. As such, Structuring the Void will prove invaluable to anyone with an interest in contemporary literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822399391 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Jerome Klinkowitz is Professor of English and a University Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa.
Read an Excerpt
Structuring the Void
The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction
By Jerome Klinkowitz
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1992 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9939-1
CHAPTER 1
Structuring the Void
"What do we talk about when we talk about love?" asks one of contemporary fiction's most revealing titles. Its dilemma in describing the immense amount of activity centering around something that can never be satisfactorily defined reflects a problem common to many other postmodern pursuits. What is it, for example, that theologians discuss, when their own theology says God no longer exists? And what do painters paint when the best of them claim that their canvases are not surfaces upon which to represent but rather arenas within which to act? Granted, their painting becomes its own subject, just as discussions of the death of God keep the concept alive. But if the subject matter itself has been declared nonexistent, one can hardly say that the acts of painting or discussing are of thematic or even topical pertinence, for the whole question of being "about" something has become invalid.
For fiction, made as it is of words, the problem is even more obvious. Words are signs, and signs by nature refer to something other than themselves; the four alphabetic characters that spell out "tree" have for their subject the deciduous or coniferous woody plant which additional words can then specify. Deconstructive philosophy teaches that we are never really talking about things, only the relationships between them—specifically those relations that indicate what the thing is not. Again, the basis is linguistic: the object spelled out by the three letters of "cat" is not necessarily the feline animal we picture in terms of following the sign to its object of reference, but rather something other than all the things the substitution of twenty-five other letters in each slot would indicate—"rat," "hat," "mat," and so forth ad infinitum.
And these are simply the linguistic and philosophic considerations. Taking fiction on its most traditional terms, the crisis is even more acute. For if a novel or short story is supposed to provide, in imaginatively creative form, news from the world, then what in fact can its subject be when the entire notion of being "about" something has become a circular question? Yet, just as theologians talk and painters paint, fiction writers continue to write, and their books are filled with ostensible content. There are even, in these postmodern times, love stories. But what in fact do we write about when we write about love?
The answer involves devising for fiction an understanding similar to the deconstructive philosophers' interpretation of knowledge as a comprehension of system rather than substance and abstract artists' appreciation of painting as expression rather than illustration. Writers surely create something, but their fiction is no longer seen best in terms of subject or even content, but rather as a structuring act that becomes its own reality. Thus even though all material claims yield only a void, it is a structured void, with the fiction writer's acts creating a systematic web of relationships that is sustained not by what it captures or spans but rather by its own network of constructions.
Structuring the void turns out to be what many of the innovative fiction writers of the American 1960s were up to. Their movement was the first in several generations—since the 1920s, in fact—to mount a programmatic challenge against established conventions, and at the time much of their exuberance was attributed to the customary rambunctiousness of revolution and the almost sexual thrill of overthrowing staid authority. Needless to say, there was much rowdiness and lack of inhibition in the air, and some of the period's novels—notably those following the line from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and Tom Robbins's Another Roadside Attraction—rely more heavily on revolutionary themes than techniques and therefore, like the black humor fiction of the late fifties and earlier sixties by the likes of Terry Southern and Bruce Jay Friedman, spend a great deal of time calling for an aesthetic revolt while sustaining the literary forms used by those they claim to be the oppressors. Yet a quarter century's hindsight reveals that the highest stylistic profiles—the fiction of Richard Brautigan, Ishmael Reed, and Ronald Sukenick, for example—are achieved not by prescriptions for new social, political, and behavioral structures but by acts of nonreferential structurings themselves.
Consider the free-floating ideas in Richard Brautigan's works: "in watermelon sugar" and "trout fishing in America," which on their ways to becoming titles for novels are cast about like themes in search of references, concepts in search of philosophies, or principles in search of beliefs. Though each is repeated scores of times, neither is allowed to attach itself to or even become the expression of any truly referential material. The phrase can identify a character, a place, or an attitude, its very interchangeability of reference eclipsing the notion of reference itself. Along the way Brautigan does so much else with language—notably lengthening the gap in metaphors between tenor and vehicle so that all sense of comparison is forgotten in the simple joy of having bridged such distance—that the resultant narrative becomes nothing more than a delightful exercise in imaginative flexibility and expansion. From Trout Fishing in America (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1967) one recalls not the central character (for there is none) or the novel's theme (which is so general as to be a celebration of the imagination itself) but rather the comparisons, both expressed and implied, such as a neglected graveyard for paupers whose grass has "turned a flat-tire brown in the summer and stayed that way until the rain, like a mechanic, began in the late autumn" and then the rain itself doing its work "like a sleepy short-order cook cracking eggs over a grill next to a railroad station" (pp. 20-21). The distance between "grass" and "flat tire" is immense, and the act of joining the two to prompt the reader's insight is truly inspired, but what makes a narrative happen within the language itself is the orderly sequential and developmental movement between "flat-tire" and "mechanic," which yields a world in action. Yet for all temptations to make reference to an outward reality, the initial improbability of joining tenor and vehicle make the sentence an experience of aesthetics rather than of the world.
A decade and a half later, near the end of his life in the culturally different (and certainly alien) 1980s, Brautigan's most characteristic style still avoided reporting about the world in favor of structuring the void. In his last novel, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1982), he transposes his approach to language to the notion of time, which is also seen more as a system of differences than for anything of substance in itself. When Brautigan's narrator puts himself back into the past for the occasion of writing this book, he finds himself dealing with several layers of narrative existence, from the present in which he works (the 1980s) through the 1940s events narrated to the various objects of an even more distant past the narrator-as-a-boy discovered back then, such as an ancient perambulator: "I walked very carefully over to the baby buggy. I didn't want to stumble over the past and break my present-tense leg that might leave me crippled in the future. I took the handle of the baby buggy and pulled it away from the 1900s and into the year 1947" (p. 11). What the narrator does here is give the reader a sense of "one's time and life on earth" not by concocting a referential theme but rather demonstrating its effect in a structural composition, suspending 1900, 1947, and 1982 in a continuum supported only by his storytelling presence and the reader's act as audience to it. Sometimes syntax alone can do it, as when following an uneventful morning one can note that "The sun had reversed its boredom and now had grown interesting as it began its descent which would soon open the beginning doors of night and the wind had died down making the pond as still and quiet as sleeping glass" (pp. 55-56). The antihierarchal nature of the conjunction and clears the way for letting poetic fancy and natural observation blend into one seamless text of narrative, anchored only by the metaphoric junction of "sleeping" and "glass."
What Richard Brautigan does with time, Ishmael Reed does with history. In the hands of novelists and new journalists from Norman Mailer to Hunter S. Thompson, history had lost its problematic nature (think of all those devilings of Faulkner and Wolfe) and become something to be played with rather than played by, less a source of nightmare and inhibition than a field for exuberant action—in other words not as a determining subject but as a void within which one could pose endless structures. Reed's own belief in the comparative, pluralistic view of multiculturalism (not one history but many different histories, much like Bakhtin's polyphony of voices in narrative) lends his fiction great authority in challenging any one person's view of the world, inasmuch as that view asserts itself as theme.
Far better than E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, which courts the opposite extreme by relegating history to the status of a character acting within the reader's memory, Reed's novels do not so much tell a story as generate a language in which historical events become signs, semiotic entities which in a grammatical fashion are allowed to be themselves even as they combine to form new meanings—meanings that derive their sense not by external reference but by pertinence to their own function in the author's composition. At one point in The Terrible Twos (New York: St. Martin's Press/Richard Marek, 1982), a futuristic novel which looks back upon the American present by reanimating its social and political signs in a new world brought into being by the narrative's constructions, the ghost of President Dwight D. Eisenhower appears to explain a little bit of the past:
"If it hadn't been for Dulles," he cried. "That man had so much Bible and brimstone inside of him. The whole family—everybody but Allen was like him. They even had a fidgety woman preacher in the family. Dulles became haunted by that young black man. Said that when the young man, then a new leader of the Congo, visited Washington he sassed Dillon and the others. Swore up and down that Lumumba would bring the Communists to the Congo. Said that the Communism was the bitch of Babylon. Kept it up. Kept it up so much that I started smoking again, though I had sworn off the habit. And so one day, I was anxious to get out and play a couple rounds of golf at Burning Tree and they'd been pestering me all day about this Patrice Lumumba fellow, and so I stamped my foot and said, a guy like that ought to take a hike. I should have known when they started shaking hands and congratulating each other that something was up. I didn't mean for them to go and kill the man." (p. 112)
Unlike Robert Coover, whose The Public Burning employs classic American myths such as Uncle Sam and the Yankee pedlar in order to propose a contemporary fable, Reed takes signs as they are used in everyday life (in this case the media's image of the bewildered chief executive worried about old habits and eager for his golf game) to create a full-fledged fiction. As signs these factors can remain materially themselves, instead of being transformed by the myth-directed artist as transparencies for meaning—a structuring principle acknowledgment of the void disallows. The secretary of state's fundamentalist Christian fire, the African leader's presumed impertinence, the president's muddled confusion: these are not history itself but rather small icons once used as the lingua franca of the times, not as symbols of imposed meaning, and in Reed's fiction they contribute to the grammatical language of fiction.
Reed's transformation of history from fact to fictive tool squares with Ronald Sukenick's understanding of the novel's superiority. Much as Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon acknowledges as source material not the NASA event itself but rather its structuralization as narrative by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edward E. Aldrin, Jr. (and just as his Marilyn shares copyright with several other secondary accounts), Sukenick sorts out the differences between fact and fiction as outlined in his In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985):
The great advantage of fiction over history, journalism, or any other supposedly "factual" kind of writing is that it is an expressive medium. It transmits feeling, energy, excitement. Television can give us the news, but fiction can best express our response to the news. No other medium—especially not film—can so well deal with our strongest and often most intimate responses to the larger and small facts of our daily lives. No other medium, in other words, can so well keep track of the reality of our experience, (p. 242)
With Sukenick's fiction comes the critical vocabulary of postmodernism, as his work displays a combination of authorial intention and narrative action known as the self-reflexive, an interweaving of source materials and artistic creation called intertextuality, and a brash challenge to monological authority referred to as dialogical. Common to all three terms is an incorporation of the extraliterary in the act of fiction, a force that accommodates the world, not as an authenticating subject but as another text cited (think of Mailer's Marilyn if Sukenick's own Out and 98.6 seem too abstract), and that undermines the authority of order by showing how arbitrary and conventional (and subject to carnivalesque play) such orders are, particularly when we assume they come from the real world instead of from the writer's imagination.
The lessons Brautigan, Reed, and Sukenick strive to teach about fiction are ones learned almost a century earlier in painting, the art that often precedes the novel's innovation and gives it an aesthetic vocabulary. Just as Cézanne had separated the optical elements of experience from the conceptual, so do these writers sort out the constructive from the constituted; and as the Impressionist artist elaborates not so much on what is there as what he sees and how he sees it, the fictionist strives to efface content and privilege the structuring that is his or her part in acting. Before a painting is a bowl of apples, nude woman, or battle scene, it is a painting, a plane covered with colors and composed in a certain order; and with the need to represent a subject removed entirely, as the abstract expressionists found, the paint's action on the canvas could indeed become its own subject. Surely, the counterpoise of colors and textures in paint on canvas was as real as any subject matter that could be depicted, and moving directly to such counter-position rather than digressing through the form of a previously existing object could only enhance the nature of one's artistic act.
Not that such painting or such writing valorizes form as a principle or ideal toward which all else is made dependent. It is not the enduring but the momentary that matters in such works, the physical immediacy of real (and not recounted) experience. True, there are signs and symbols to be felt out (Brautigan's image of life in 1900, Reed's comic recollection of the president's 1950s image), but for readers the essence of experience remains in being entangled within the sensitizing process of narrative that turns out to be the message itself. If what has produced it is the artist's or writer's gesture, it is a gesture that lingers, like the graphic lines of a work by Cy Twombly (none of which means but all of which are sustained in a trace of their existence). It is the gesture that remains, not any product that it might otherwise indicate: gesture as the surplus of action, the action that has created the work. Born from the surface itself, the work (painting or narrative) finds its reality in the process of manipulation, not the object produced. Indeed, it is the graphic event that allows surface to exist at all.
Just as the major struggle in twentieth-century painting is between paint itself and what it becomes when applied to the canvas, so too does innovative fiction entertain the same distinction when it comes to the matter of its key element of composition. Is that element the word or the language that words form? InFiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970) novelist William H. Gass signals a radical break with conventionally (and unquestioning) realistic fiction by climaxing his argument with the linguistic nature of his medium:
It seems a country-headed thing to say: that literature is language, that stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words as chairs are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth or metal tubes. Still, we cannot be too simple at the start, since the obvious is often the unobserved. Occasionally we should allow the trite to tease us into thought, for such old friends, the clichés of our life, are the only strangers we can know. It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams. That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking, really. It's as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber; the bliss of all those years, the fears ... from sponge. (p. 27)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Structuring the Void by Jerome Klinkowitz. Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,1 Structuring the Void,
2 Biography: Kurt Vonnegut's America,
3 Ritual: Max Apple's History of Our Times,
4 Comedy: Gerald Rosen and Rob Swigart's California,
5 Constraint: Gender,
6 Constraint: Vietnam,
7 Beyond Time's Constraint: Spatial Form,
Index,