I doubt anyone will ever publish an anthology called Great Fiction That You Won't Likely Find
Elsewhere. It's a title that would have suited Robert McLaughlin's Innovations: an Anthology of Modern and
Contemporary Fiction. The project of the title which McLaughlin did select
is a bit tricky to pin down. His introduction, and the preface by John O'Brien,
give the short story collection a manifesto-like character which I thoroughly
enjoyed. O'Brien: "That the
mainstream reviewer has difficulty with this fiction speaks to...how profoundly
ill-read most reviewers are and how dull they are" (ix). McLaughlin:
"One might think of the purpose of art as being to sow confusion. I like
this idea of art" (xvii). Me too. I also like McLaughlin's insistence that certain gatekeepers of
culture--let's say "mainstream reviewers"--think far too little of
the mainstream reader's intellectual abilities, not to mention spirit of play.
Certain yesmen who call themselves critics (McLaughlin fingers James Atlas, for
example) have volunteered in a Dumb Down America campaign which has led to the
arid cultural climate where certain species of art can't easily flourish. But
which species of art would that/those be (besides writing in general, of
course)? This is where McLaughlin might just as well have said, "read the damn
book and see," because the efforts by both he and O'Brien to characterize
the common denominator in their featured authors are either strained or even
mildly disingenuous. This is not to say the works don't represent a common
'school' or attitude toward fiction--McLaughlin considers and rejects terms
like avant-garde, experimental, and postmodern, finally settling on innovative (doesn't work for me). It's
just that the conceptual boundaries around this 'movement' or 'aesthetic' are
still too hazy to tie down. And who cares? I don't, really, except that I think
the envelope is too often defined in the wrong ways. For example, emcee O'Brien
ends his preface with "we will not warn the reader that there are no
plots, that the characters are not real people, that there are few if any
lessons to be learned (except perhaps about fiction)..."(x). This last
"non-warning" is what disturbs me the most. The goal of providing
alternatives to tepid, allegedly 'social-issue' driven bourgeois realism is
laudable, and urgent. But does it require more imaginative writers to dispense
altogether with commenting on anything other than formal technique? Happily, the stories in Innovations
go well beyond the technically difficult (though intellectually simple)
assignment of playing games with language or subverting/extending the forms and
act of fiction. The best work in the anthology acts on many fronts. It has a
distinctive and often beautiful surface (language), it plays magic tricks on
dear reader by messing with formal expectations (self-referentiality, parody,
metafiction, etc.), and it does offer "social lessons"--in
aesthetic, artful ways, of course. It's a tough
twelve stories to organize into any coherent order. But I'm going to do it even
though it's gauchely unpostmodern. I'd group them into three periods and call
them Genesis (John Barth, Donald
Barthelme, Robert Coover, Gilbert Sorrentino); Prehistory (Felipe Alfau, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein); and Continuing Tradition (William Gaddis,
Cris Mazza, David Foster Wallace, Curtis White, John Edgar Wideman). Felipe Alfau's "A Character" starts the ensemble off on the
correct note. In the first paragraph we learn of the writer's intent to write a
story, but hardly does he begin when he's called away and must postpone his
writing. Then we get this: "Now that the author has set me on paper and
given me a body and a start, I shall proceed with the story and tell it in my
own words" (1-2). Of course all kinds of strange adventures take place as the
story's boundaries fade away at points, come crashing down at others. The act
of pulling the form out from under the reader's feet causes a sense of
slippage--let's call it a headtrip--that I've always found pleasant. Many,
though not all, of the assembled stories feature such technical maneuvers. John
Barth, in his famous "Menelaiad," threads around layers so fast as to
induce a faintly sickening giddiness. Barth's story, told by the character
of Menelaus to himself and Homeric dinner guests, is classic parody gone
whole-hog at every level of word, sentence, page, and hopelessly obscured
flashback. Robert Coover also warps the field of representation in "You
Must Remember This." He gives us the raunchy porno scene with Bogie and
Bergman that we never saw in Casablanca,
then trips things up as the poor movie images begin to sense the inhuman
limitations of their unworldy stage. If you like this kind of thing--I love it--Innovations offers exemplary material. However,
not all of the fictions do this. Many of the stories' "innovations"
are not very deep in a formal sense. This doesn't make these stories bad
fiction, it just points up the strain in the editors' attempt at aesthetic
coherence. The Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein selections ("Ladies Almanack:
July,""A Little Novel"), while certainly innovative in terms of
language--especially the magnificent Barnes--don't lead to any radical new
awareness of form beyond the easy promise of their titles. David Foster
Wallace's "Little Expressionless Animals," for all its flashy sound
quality, is basically a story of romance, fame, and betrayal set in heartless
Hollywood. A fine genre in itself, but how "innovative" is it,
really? I know, Alex Trebek and Pat Sajak are characters, it's about the pathos
of a Jeopardy! champion, and it's all
so deliciously tongue-in-cheek! That's fun stuff, of course, but it's basic
satire, really, not a huge leap in terms of form. It's a great story, though
and this is why: it exposes the tawdry, but really tragic, silliness of a
culture that elevates media moguls to cosmic visionaries and which, like Jeopardy!, reduces all values to equal,
small, trivial meanings. In other words, like the best realism, it subjects
contemporary (read: postmodern)
culture to an unforgiving mirror. In this case, the mirror has a groovy frame,
is maybe tinted some funky color, but it's basically the same operation. Another story which subverts form only superficially is Cris Mazza's
"Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?" It looks like this on the page: In the left column
is a fairly uninflected third-person account of a floor captain at a fancy
restaurant who is stalked, whose life is pretty well destroyed, by an
obsessive, disturbed waitress. The right column has the distinctively voiced first-person
point of view of the predatory waitress herself, who reports that the floor
captain has been sexually harassing her, though this is the least of her
imaginative accusations. But which of the two voices is the more unreliable, really?
The edgy female's voice, or the one that comes across as more detached? This technique raises questions about narrative reliability and
demonstrates the writerly craft of inventing distinct and opposed voices, but
the use of columns rather than successive sections to accomplish this is
primarily a visual innovation only. I tried reading the two 'simultaneous'
narratives at the same time, but I couldn't pull it off. Mazza's story is a
fine one, however, and it's also "important." It's downright
prescient. It doesn't bother me that the story offers, in fairly
straightforward language, a "lesson" about one of the pressing social
issues of our time. The content and form do not sardonically contradict each
other, they ask together: has the unfinished work of the feminist revolution
left us in a limbo of severed halves? At any rate,
depriving Mazza's story of its political dimension would make it an
unsatisfying half-a-loaf. The freshest and most invigorating breeze in Innovations was for me an easy choice: Curtis White's
"Bonanza," an excerpt from his 1998 book, Memories of My Father Watching T.V. "Bonanza" presents a
view of Bonanza, the T.V. series, as
filtered through the Beckett-esque flatulent rage of a narrative entity
referred to as the "Wild Father." The Wild Father claims that he was
never accepted as a character by Ben, Hoss, and Little Joe Cartwright, so he
now spews creative, critical hatred at everything they represent (which is a
lot). Sometimes, though, the Wild Father seems to be only a wasted, petty man
watching too much T.V. and approaching a death caused by bad lifestyle choices.
Meanwhile, form is bent every which way as the tenor of the language morphs
from Ponderosa platitudes to filthy obscenity to stereotype blackjive to
pseudo-academic. All of it parody, vicious parody. But the main reason the
piece works so well is--dare I say it?--because of its emotional intensity. It's a pissed-off story that stinks as badly
as the disgusting secretions of the Wild Father himself, which are described in
gross, icky detail. Finally, the politico-cultural rage saturating White's fiction is the
best argument against limiting the kind of work represented in Innovations through overly formalist or
language-oriented definitions. The best stories in the book have the three-fold
attack strategy of form + language + cultural subversion. In his introduction,
Robert McLaughlin slams James Atlas for complacently admitting that he never
plans to read Faulkner's Absalom,
Absalom! McLaughlin is correctly outraged that Atlas' only response to the
sensual miracle of the Absalom
language is apparently boredom. In addition to its unique and beautiful voice, Absalom, Absalom! is a milestone in the
modernist exploration of the limits of form. It also speaks volumes about the
relationship between history in the abstract and the human subjects who 'make'
and re-tell it. But the final ingredient is equally essential: it's deeply
critical of a real history and a real place, and the writer's profound
emotional engagement with the issues involved is unfakeable. Such criteria are also satisfied by the best work in Innovations. The collection is capped by
a recommended reading list of a hundred and one titles, drawn mostly from the
past fifty years. I haven't read all of them, but most of the ones I have read
are critical not only of form, but of culture and society in more concrete ways
as well. Many of the big American titles could easily be called "New
Left" (especially if you add 'pre-' and 'post-'). Most of the list that
I'm familiar with is pretty much anti-bourgeois in either a Nietzchean or a
Marxist sense. Terms like avant-garde, modernist, postmodern, experimental, and
"innovative" simply don't factor in this final, essential subversive
element. Maybe we should at last steer away from words that sheepishly lay
claim either to language or chronology alone. Maybe we should pick one which
would bring a messy cluster of uncontrollable associations with it: Radical?
Subversive? Bohemian? Or maybe we
should just read lots more of it and keep thinking, laughing, dreaming. |