(All three chapters as single pdf available here.)
Chapter 1: Sorrentino the Poet
There is no question that Gilbert Sorrentino considered himself first of all to be a poet. He began his writing career not just writing but also reviewing and publishing poetry, most prominently in the little magazines he edited, Neon and Kulchur. While it now seems almost certain that Sorrentino will be remembered primarily as a writer of fiction, certainly that fiction is sufficiently unconditional in its rejection of the traditional core elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, theme—and so unmistakably focused instead on creating alternative formal arrangements of language that it is considerably more than a fancy to say that essentially Sorrentino remained a poet throughout his whole body of work, whose key aesthetic assumptions are recognizably embodied in the poetry as well as the fiction. (Continue)
Chapter 2: Sorrentino the Realist
The publication of Sorrentino's first novel after he had established himself as a poet—at least in those quarters of the poetry world whose notice would have meant the most to him—perhaps conveys the impression that writing fiction was a kind of literary second thought. Even while Sorrentino continued to write lyric poetry for the remainder of his life, the succession of novels that followed the publication of The Sky Changes in 1966 certainly did soon enough foster the perception that he had altered his career course to become primarily a novelist. But a proper appreciation of Sorrentino's whole body of work can be gained only be recognizing that the poetry and the fiction are not divergent practices, that the fiction represents Sorrentino's effort to engage with language for the purpose that also motivates the poet: sounding out the artistic possibilities that can be realized through the imaginative arrangement of words. (Continue)
Chapter 3: Sorrentino the Metafictionist
Part 1: “Of and For Itself”: Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things marks a clear turn in Sorrentino’s conception both of the formal requirements of a novel—of fiction in general—and of the specific imperatives implied by his own aesthetic inclinations as a writer. Indeed, while this turn is obvious enough to anyone considering Sorrentino’s career in retrospect, it must have been apparent to Sorrentino, even if he did not begin writing this successor to Steelwork having explicitly determined to make it. Although the move from Sorrentino’s first two novels to Imaginative Qualities could be characterized as the final abandonment of literary realism, the alternative he embraced is even more sweeping. If both The Sky Changes and Steelwork retained a loose allegiance to realism (the latter even more tenuously), neither novel cast its realism in conventional narrative form. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things takes its divergence from conventional form to the point that realism becomes simply extraneous. (Continue)
Part 2: "Walking Around Inside": Mulligan Stew
In many ways, the publication of a novel like Mulligan Stew in 1979 should not have seemed especially startling. Not only had it been preceded by Sorrentino's own Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, perhaps the most radical work of postmodern metafiction to have yet appeared, but the entire period in American fiction from the early 1960s to the late 70s was notable for the number of writers employing a kind of iconoclastic, "carnivalesque" comedy--the term used by Bakhtin to describe a spirit of comedic abandon that subjects everything in its purview to parody and mockery. The black humor of Heller and Vonnegut explicitly adopts this attitude, while the equally mordant if less readily categorizable comedy of writers such as Stanley Elkin or Thomas Pynchon participate in this spirit as well. Although not indulging in quite the sort of outrageous self-parody characterizing Mulligan Stew, novels like William Gaddis's JR, Robert Coover's The Public Burning, and John Barth's Letters nevertheless were equally ambitious, comedically extravagant novels published in the mid and late 1970s (Letters the same year as Mulligan Stew). (Continue)
Still to come (tentatively): 4) Sorrentino the Anarchist; 5) Sorrentino the Craftsman; 6) Sorrentino the Oulipian; 7) Sorrentino the Aesthete; 8) Sorrentino the Moralist; 9) Sorrentino the Humorist