Fiction Collective

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 17:31

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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


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.

100 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE


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.

FICTION COLLECTIVE I 101


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



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.

FICTION COLLECTIVE 103


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



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.

FICTION COLLECTIVE | 105


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.



. . 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.

FICTION COLLECTIVE I 107


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.



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



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



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.



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

112 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE


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.



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



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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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]

Documents

Fiction Collective