7
We have been reviewing the ways authors disturb normative literary conventions and, as a result, shake, riddle, and roil readers out of their ordinary expectations and ho-hum responses. We have considered how the conventional hero is downgraded and debased, how even authors are implicated or impugned, how language is manipulated to imitate or expose sentimentality, sanctimony, chicanery, and cant, and how games and ploys are utilized to tarnish, subvert, and displace traditional “realistic” plots. Continuing in the same vein, this chapter considers further strategies authors deploy to break down traditional fictions and to sully or destroy the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” As a matter of fact, the incidence of intrusions and obstructions is, in twentieth-century literature, steadily on the increase—but these traditions have been accessible for centuries.
Yet so frequently has recent literary work been associated with experimentation and novelty that it has been given a niche of its own and designated rather grandly as “postmodern fiction.”1 Jerome Klinkowitz perceives a whole new world of literary forms being created since the late 1960s that is unique, especially in its uses of what he terms “literary disruption.”2 And it is quite true that recent writers do strive to be disruptive in their fictions.
Numbers of authors of late have flagrantly “jostled” or “toyed” with their own fictions, quite often disrupting the fictional narrative with a variety of inept scene changes, with abrupt alterations of mood, tone, or theme; often mocking the fictionality of the fiction by permitting it to be invaded by elements of news, autobiography, anachronism, hearsay, history, divagation, parody, and just plain detour that debunks the sacrosanct “forms” of literature—or even by creating a fiction that is blatantly absurd, far-fetched, peculiarly naive and jejune, and awkward. A second species of disruption, achieved by the author’s breaking somehow into the fiction in propria persona, intruding other “voices” and particularly some species of the author’s own distinctly nonfictional voice into the story’s framework, also shatters staid conventions and dislocates normative expectations.3
The former kind of disruption, wherein fact is confounded with fiction and the narrative surface is flurried by deliberate ineptitudes and dislocations, can be clearly observed in the fictions of William Burroughs, in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels and screen plays, in Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (1969), in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965), and in the tales of Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth. Jorge Luis Borges frequently confounds fact and fiction in his short stories, as in “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in which an actual encyclopedia is puffed with fictional pages. In “Three Versions of Judas,” scholarly footnotes, precise biblical citations, and respectable theologians are interlarded with fictional names, blasphemy, and fanciful debates. In “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” Borges ponders the statistical probability of a second author’s identifying totally with Cervantes and recomposing Don Quixote. What Borges does best is to catapult the world of meditation, of ratiocination, of fact and data—the proper domain of the essay, the treatise, and the report—out of its context, implying that reasoning and data are themselves wildly fictitious. Occasionally, too, Borges creates the persona of a critic who himself writes defective meditations and askew critical essays.4
Vladimir Nabokov also is a master of mixing scholarship with fiction. His novel Pale Fire (1962) interfuses a poem, a scholarly annotated edition of that poem, and the wildest vagaries, imaginings, and meanderings of a demented annotator all in a single creation. But such disruption need not merely consist of the intermingling of the fictional and the discursive. Gabriel García Márquez, in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), frequently obtains powerful effects simply by injecting a sudden overdose of imagery into the narrative mode, so that the excess will reduce the whole to the incredible, the fantastic, the absurd. This is done, for example, in the narrative of the secret liaison and love affair between Meme Buendía and the apprentice mechanic Mauricio Babilonia. Improbably, their regular trysting place is the family’s bathhouse, and the mechanic-lover is everywhere accompanied, we are informed, by an enormous horde of yellow butterflies.5 That is doubtless the greatest calling card invented since the cow bell.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughter-House Five (1969) carries such narrative disjunction to an extreme. His tale of everyday humdrum Americans on earth is regularly interrupted by a gigantic leap in space-time to other scenes upon the distant planet Tralfamadore. Indeed, such disruption might even include the intrusion into fiction of the “paperchase” world of bureaucracy and tabulation. Donald Barthelme suddenly halts his distorted retelling of Snow White (1967) to interject a reader questionnaire, that contains such queries as
1. Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( )
5. In the further development of the story, would you like more emotion ( ) or less emotion ( )?
8. Would you like a war? Yes ( ) No ( )
9. Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( )
14. Do you stand up when you read? ( ) Lie down? ( ) Sit? ( )6
Since our dry quotidian world is already vastly cluttered with letters to the editor, with revenue reports, with public opinion surveys, why shouldn’t these materials invade our periods of relaxation, our worlds of fiction? In any event, almost all the stories selected by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer in the collection Innovative Fiction (Dell, 1972) contain some sort of far-fetched use of imagination (causing a reductio ad absurdum) or a tampering with the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction. These disruptions are similarly self-evident in the anthology edited by Philip Stevick, pointedly entitled Anti-Story (Free Press, 1971).
The latter kind of disruption, in which the author in some manner breaks into his fiction in his own person, can be found in John Barth’s Chimera (1972), in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Breakfast of Champions (1973), and in the esoteric fictions of such writers as Ronald Sukenick, Raymond Federman, and Jonathan Baumbach.7
In Barth’s tale, Bellerophon in ancient mythic Greece recovers a manuscript in a bottle that refers to Napoleon, to Maryland, to very modern notes for a revolutionary novel concerned with a character Bray (to be met in Barth’s novel Giles Goat-Boy [1966]), and to a series of novels that are in fact fictional continuations of books earlier written by Barth himself. In Vonnegut’s novel, the fictional character Kilgore Trout at the close has a pathetic encounter with Vonnegut himself. And in Ronald’s Sukenick’s Up (1968), Sukenick himself is a character in his own novel, but he also arranges for the appearance of novelists and friends. We encounter (on a scrap of paper) a dedication “To Steve Katz here briefly on a special guest appearance from his own novel.”8
Even more strikingly, seven-eighths of the way through William H. Gass’s supposed novel, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), the reader is jogged awake from what he had taken to be a flurry of prostitute’s monologues, fornications, asides, changing typefaces, footnotes, fabricated skits, and metaphorical meanderings by what appears to be, on a fresh page, sudden, pithy, and disconcertingly direct communication from the author himself to the reader:
YOU’VE
BEEN
HAD
haven’t you, jocko? you sad sour stew-faced sonofabitch. really, did you read this far? puzzle your head? turn the pages this and that, around about? Was it racy enough to suit? There wasn’t too much plot? . . . Nothing lasts.9
As if to make the matter of authorial intervention clear, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., once affirmed, “I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. . . . I have always rigged my stories so as to include myself, and I can’t stop now.”10 If such self-intrusion can be said to promote “disruption,” then surely we should consider a great many recent authors subversive and disturbing.
The point that needs stressing, however, is that such “literary disruption” is by no means new to the literary scene. It appears to be too often assumed that “modernists” (see Conrad and James) were conservative, staid, and conventional, whereas more recent authors are “unshackled” and liberally “experimental.” It is not so. Yet if we are to believe Jerome Klinkowitz, the “post-contemporary” innovations began precisely “with the publishing season of 1967-68,” inaugurating, in America at least, a “radical disruption of [the genre of fiction’s] development.”11 We should counter that such novelty is not so innovative or neoteric after all, and with the preacher we might affirm that “there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.”12
We should recall that in fifth-century Athens, Aristophanic comedy regularly utilized a chorus that does conventionally “break into” its dramatic fictions in the voice of the author during the play’s para-basis. Elsewhere in the plays, Aristophanes goes to considerable lengths to frustrate or fracture dramatic illusion by injecting sudden references to the audience or to stage props.13 Moreover, writers like Horace, Dante, and Chaucer complicated their fictions by inserting central characters bearing their own names. Voltaire could inject himself into his own fiction, as could James Joyce and Pirandello as well.14
In the same manner, the tradition of narrative disturbance is equally as old, notably evident in Menippean satire, particularly in Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis (ca. A.D. 54) and in Petronius’s Satyricon (ca. A.D. 60).15 These works later influenced a great deal of fictional ploys, as in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (1509), More’s Utopia (1516), and even Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In fact, such strains of narrative disturbance appear in the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704), in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–34), in Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” (1864), in Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925), and in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).
Surely, too, our “postmodern” fiction has derived much from the deliberate antifictions of the nineteenth-century French avant-garde literature, followed by works in the twentieth century of impressionist painters, expressionist playwrights, and particularly dadaist and surrealist writers. Assuredly, twentieth-century literature has been given a certain impetus by the mad, intrusive surrealist fictions of André Breton (Nadja, 1928) and of Louis Aragon (Le Paysan de Paris, 1926). Such disruptive fictions, together with the programmatic cubism of Picasso, certainly affected the writings of Gertrude Stein and, through her, a significant strain of American writing. Consider, for instance, the prose of William Carlos Williams, such distorted fictions as Robert M. Coates’s The Eater of Darkness (1926) and John Hawkes’s The Cannibal (1949), and the novels of Harry Matthews and Thomas Pynchon.16
When all is said and done, however, the great-great granddaddy of modern fiction, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–15), establishes an admirable convention and a most striking example of magnificent dislocation in part 1, chapter 9. Don Quixote and a Basque squire are abruptly left stranded in the midst of battle with swords aloft; they are frozen there, and the author intervenes in his narrative. We suddenly learn from him for the first time that the original manuscript of the book we are reading has been “lost” and that there are no less than three authors of the tale we have been blandly pursuing and taking for granted: one Cide Hamete Benengeli, the “historian,” composed the original in Arabic; a low Arab peasant translator was hired for several pence to render the whole in Spanish; and our own “author” (at last), Cervantes himself, is thus a mere editor. Surely no such panoply of multiplying authors or such a disruption of narrative has ever more handsomely perverted and mocked the pious conventions of normative storytelling. Furthermore, we recall that François Rabelais, in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–52), posed as someone else, as the learned grand chronicler Alcofribas Nasier. With fiction given such jolts, starts, and disguises at the outset of the Renaissance, it is small wonder that artists in the subsequent tradition continued such innovation. It is at least clear that at the dawning of the novelistic tradition, invention, digression, and interruption were intrinsic in satiric literary practice and to a large extent even became conventional. Such disruptions certainly continued in the novelistic practice of Paul Scarron, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne.
Recent authors, therefore, have simply been breaking away from the nineteenth century’s special addiction to and reliance upon realism, and it should be no surprise that older conventions have been revitalized.17 In fact, in our day, fantasy, science fiction, fictional biography, dystopia, parody, and satire are all hale, hearty, and zestfully thriving. Naysayers who regularly anticipate the death of the novel to the contrary, the possibilities for all kinds of fiction nowadays are enormous, and recent writers continue to tap and distill the rich resources of a broad, fluid, and hoary literary tradition. The best we can do is to wish them well.