Doing Something as a Reality

In his book on the work of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman (The Novel as Performance (1986)), Jerzy Kutnik comments:

The rise of Action Painting, the Happening, The Living Theatre, John Cage's experimental music and Charles Olson's "projective verse," to name only a few examples of performance-oriented works of the 1950s and 1960s, forced many aestheticians to review the underlying assumptions of classic aesthetics. Performance was now seen as a category which could be made relevant to all art forms. Indeed, for the postmodern artist, performance was shown to be an essential element of all creative activity, a fundamental value in itself, an indispensable, even unavoidable, ingredient of the work of art.

But it should also be noted that performance is not something that, as a result of certain historical developments, was added as a new element in the creative process, for it had always been there, though ignored or suppressed. What was added, rather, was the awareness that all art is always performatory, that it not so much says something about reality, but, by its occurence and presence, does something as a reality in its own right. . . .

Although I am working on a longer post about Federman's fiction that will appear shortly and that will return to what Kutznick says here, I would like to more briefly discuss the implications of Kutznick's point as it applies generally to both "experimental" fiction and to the "aesthetic" approach to fiction as a whole that I pursue on this blog. 

Federman is a writer who directly and self-consciously engages in a "performance" strategy--anyone who picks up Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It will immediately encounter Federman's notational performance as his text spreads itself across and down the page in seemingly (but not actually) chaotic arrangements--but ultimately his work forces us (or should force us) to consider the extent to which the writing of fiction and poetry is always, as Kutznick points out, about doing rather than saying. While few fiction writers play around with "text" as explicitly as Federman (or Sukenick), poets have certainly always done so; thus, what Kutznick is really getting at is that the work of writers like Federman insists that fiction as well be a mode in which the writer "does something as a reality."

The great majority of literary fiction is overwhelmingly dedicated to the task of saying something. This is why the great majority of literary fiction is not worth reading. Not only do most writers of such fiction have very little to say in the first place--the "theme" of most literary novels can usually be reduced to platitudes--but whatever "performance" that is involved in the use of the elements of fiction is dull and familiar, at best focused on forwarding the theme most expeditiously. Much experimental fiction is also dull and familiar, reworkings of previous, and better, performances of other experimentalists. However, the departures from the norm to be found in even the most perfunctory experimental fiction does at least continue to remind us that it is possible to conceive of fiction as a practice in which form and language are malleable, the medium through which the writer may offer a fresh and distinctive performance.

Even from within the confines of conventional practices it is possible to write fiction that is more doing than saying. The enactment of point of view and narrative structure affords ample opportunities for "performance-oriented work," and the best fiction has always taken advantage of these opportunities. Style also can be an "ingredient" in the performance of literary art, as long as style is regarded as something other than, something beyond, "pretty writing" of the usual kind. Unfortunately, most attempts to manipulate these elements that I read (or start to read) are again usually carried out in the name of more colorfully reinforcing theme, not as a performance seeking out its own limits or capable of sustaining interest in and of itself.

As Larry McCaffery puts it in his foreword to Kutznick's book, writers like Sukenick and Federman (and, I might add, Gilbert Sorrentino and Stephen Dixon and David Foster Wallace, to name only three) show us that the most challenging fiction "seeks to be an experience for its own sake." This is precisely what John Dewey, the foremost proponent of "art as experience," had in mind when he extolled the achievement of "adventurous" art. Like all other such art, adventurous fiction enhances experience by encouraging us to attend more closely to performance, in the best cases a performance unlike any we've experienced before.

Comments

[arthur]

And yet it seems to me that Wallace was a writer highly concerned with "saying something".

[Dan Green]

I've never read in him in that way. Whatever impulse he had to "say" something was luckily overridden by his skill in doing something, in literary performance.

[LML]

Why does it have to be either/or? Arthur's right about Wallace, and almost all of the top-shelf postmodernists (certainly Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo) have lots to say, in many cases things that hadn't really been said before, or not quite in that way. I share your impatience with topical books or books that don't try to do anything but explicate a theme, but I don't see why saying something is incompatible with literary performance. For me, the best books both say something and make an event out of the saying.

[Dan Green]

"in many cases things that hadn't really been said before, or not quite in that way"

I just don't agree they hadn't been said before. Capitalism is a runaway machine (JR)? The American judicial system is fucked up (A Frolic of His Own)? Western technology is dangerous and oppressive (Gravity's Rainbow)? Platitiudes. The "not quite in that way" is everything in these writers.

[LML]

Those one-sentence synopses are hardly the totality of what those authors say about the subjects, though. Sure, JR and Gravity's Rainbow support those statements, but they also fracture them into a million little shards, each of which reveals some complicating facet of the subject or at least has fun with some complicating facet of the subject. This is not just verbal performance, it is an investigation of meaning. And this is one of my favorite things about Wallace when he's at his best: he sets up an exploration of meaning that endlessly folds in on itself, so that you come away feeling that you have experienced the irreducibility of an idea, the inability to simplify virtually any idea that is explored at enough length.

[Dan Green]

What is the fracturing of meaning into "a million little shards" if not a verbal performance? The exploration of meaning is not the same thing as the assertion of meaning.

[LML]

"What is the fracturing of meaning into "a million little shards" if not a verbal performance?"

I already said it is a verbal performance, and that it is other things besides. An exploration of theme, for example, in the cases of Gaddis or Pynchon or Wallace.

"The exploration of meaning is not the same thing as the assertion of meaning."

Agreed. And I further agree that books existing only to validate an idea generally suck. Is that all you were saying?

I thought you were saying that the authors we've mentioned actually don't say anything interesting about life, culture, art, etc., and that their books must be appreciated somehow separately from their explorations of theme. I would strongly disagree with you on this point.

[Dan Green]

Fiction that attempts to validate an idea, yes, but also that attempts to "comment" on or "observe" this or that, as well. I do think that fiction needs to be appreciated separately from its explorations of theme, or it's not aesthetically successful *as* fiction.

[Richard]

"The exploration of meaning is not the same thing as the assertion of meaning."

Where do you get the idea that only the latter constitutes a "saying" or a "something said"?

[Dan Green]

I didn't claim only the latter constitutes a something said. "Saying something" isn't necessarily the same thing as a something said. The latter might occur without the author having intended to say anything at all.

[Finn Harvor]

"The latter might occur without the author having intended to say anything at all."

Unlikely, tho'.

[Dan Green]

Writers like Federman and Sorrentino believed that to the extent their fiction "said" anything at all, it was a saying that emerged from the composition of the text, not from some antecedent, intended meaning.

[Frances Madeson]

In Double or Nothing, the liberties Federman takes, and offers, with deliberate “misspellings” in words such as “responsability” “goodby” and “handfull” make this very point about the practical relationship between composition and meaning in all of its pluridimentionality (his mouthful of a word).

Writ rather larger, late in the book there is also the explicit statement that “…in a system of double or nothing everything that is doubled or duplicated is automatically erased or negated for indeed everything that produces a forward movement also produces a backward movement and therefore what is said is never really said since it can be said differently…”.

Why else describe a character’s hard-on as “the erected dick” if not to direct reader attention (and even excitement) to just this perspective?