Richard Kostelanetz Recommends 13 Neglected Classics of Experimental Fiction

Among the eye-opening/mind-opening experiences of my undergraduate days was discovering the marvelous world of experimental fiction. As with many other adolescent American males, Kurt Vonnegut was my gateway to this genre-bending genre, Donald Barthelme my first mainstream exemplar. The Fiction Collective had just opened its doors a couple of years earlier; Paul Metcalf had just published his farewell to traditional narrative in his collage, Apalache. One of my guides was a book I picked up somewhere in late 1976: Richard Kostelanetz’s anthology, Breakthrough Fictioneers (1973) — which remains, in my view, the best single compilation some forty years later.

I was delighted, therefore, when Richard agreed to let me share the following essay, originally intended for David Madden’s Rediscoveries II, in which writers ranging from Alfred Appel to Richard Yates recommended favorite books worth bringing back into print. Richard’s recommendations exceeded Madden’s quota, so this list didn’t see print back in 1988. It is, however, available in Person of Letters, a 2013 collection of his literary essays, and will also be included in the forthcoming Unfamiliar Appreciations.

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IDENTIFYING MORE EXPERIMENTAL FICTION (1988)

An invitation from David Madden proposed that I rediscover a single neglected book title for a symposium he was editing. In reply I proposed to “do best by you if I wrote about several works of experimental fiction from the late 1960s.” He replied, “The concept of the book is that fiction writers write about their one book of fiction that needs rediscovery, rather than an article about several.” I tell him that his requirement of only one title falsifies my sense of what needs to be rediscovered now. He responded with a contract offering me fifty dollars and serial rights, nonetheless insisting that I should “focus on only one book of each writer invited to contribute: 40 writers, 40 rediscovered books.” He continues, “One essay that discussed a good number of writers, without focusing on one, would scatter the focus of our book.”

Well, my friend Madden should have remembered what I think about limitations, especially when they inhibit convictions of importance; and he should have remembered as well my own efforts, in editing anthologies, to transcend any sense of lockstep and perfunctory uniformity.

Since he sent me a contract (but wasn’t paying me enough to ensure that I play by his rules), he got the essay that, given his purposes, I thought he should have, dealing with many 1960s fictions that made radical discoveries. I offered a plethora of titles that were published in what now appears to have been the most fertile time for profoundly innovative literature in this country. (If only we knew then how unique those times were!)

Madden’s letters conjured the vision of publishers reissuing the books we rediscovered; but since he was talking about single volumes, I thought to propose a gigantic book as an addition to the Library of America, or some avant-garde equivalent (perhaps on computer disc), that would include within a single set of covers, notwithstanding differences in format and design, the following thirteen books of masterful innovative fiction:

1. Frederic Tuten’s The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), which mixes paragraphs of conventional historical narrative with fictitious incidents such as Greta Garbo propositioning Mao, and such extrinsic material as verbatim (but unidentified) quotations from a variety of literary sources (e.g., Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Marx-Engels on the origins of the family and Lord knows what else). It’s all very erudite and subtly funny.

    

    

   

2. Emmett Williams’s Sweethearts (1967), in which the title word is subject to sequential typographic variations that, as you turn its pages in Hebraic sequence, evoke a heterosexual relationship, introducing the possibility, still scarcely explored, of writing visual fiction with minimal verbal material. (A shorter fiction on the same theme is Norman H. Pritchard’s brilliant “Hoom” [1970], published in Ishmael Reed’s 19 Necromancers from Now (1970). Here two-page spreads filled entirely with “sh” are punctuated by a progressively increasing number of spreads with other kind of wordless typographical arrangements.)

    

   

3. Richard Horn’s Encyclopedia (1969), in which alphabetized notations (filled with cross-references worth following) weave an ambiguous fiction about human interrelatonships, paradoxically disordering by reordering and thus forcing the reader to pursue his or her own path in experiencing the fiction. (Why haven’t we heard from this author again? He seemed too sophisticated to be a one-shot. Someone once suggested Horn’s name might be a pseudonym for Gilbert Sorrentino, who worked as an editor at Horn’s publisher around that time; but Sorrentino’s own novels are not quite so good.)

    

   

4. Richard Hefter and Martin Stephen Moskof’s Shufflebook (1971), ostensibly a juvenile composed of a pack of cards, one side of which contains “and the [name of an animal],” while the other side has just verbs. The sequence of possible combinations is nearly infinite, and merely for approaching that concept in a book of fiction Shufflebook, notwithstanding its slick and trivial contents, is valuable. (Another novel-on-cards from this period that should have appeared as a book [and still could] is Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots [1970], photos of which came in my mail once every fortnight. As the herd of shoes is seen in various settings, they become the anthropomorphic protagonist of an extended narrative.)

    

   

5. Ed Sanders’s Shards of God (1970), which is filled with obscenity at its stylistically finest. Not unlike Tuten, Sanders reinvents history, so that, say, the ghost of Che Guevara really wants nooky, or a bourgeois lady consorts with hippies in order to collect “tool drool.” (The first word in the title incidentally means heaps of cowdung and the last word announces the underlying theme of sustained blasphemy.)

    

   

6. Kenneth Gangemi’s Olt (1969), which portrays in exquisitely measured sentences the pathology of a man unable to regard one thing as more important than another. Also, by making his sentences so complete that each can stand apart from any paragraph, Gangemi revealed a possibility for minimal fiction composed of autonomous sentences.

    

   

7. William Melvin Kelley’s Dunfords Travels Everywhere(1970), which is stylistically the most innovative fiction of a once-promising novelist less visible later.

    

   

8. G. F. Gravenson’s The Sweetmeat Saga (1971), in which the disappearance of pop music stars named Sweetmeat, brother and sister famous since their youth, are portrayed in fragments splayed rectilinearly across the manuscript pages, its language drawing upon the elliptical style of wire services and its typography upon typewriters (so that the manuscript itself had to be photocopied for definitive publication).

    

   

9. Duane Michals’s Sequences (1970), which contains stories told entirely in wordless photographs. My own favorite has always been “The Lost Shoe,” whose first image shows a deserted urban street on which a man, seen only from behind, is walking away from the camera and up the street. In the second frame he drops on the pavement a blurred object that in the third frame is seen to be a lady’s shoe. This frame, as well as the next two, suggest that he departs up the street in a great hurry. In the sixth frame the man is nowhere to be seen while the shoe is mysteriously on fire. The realism of the photographs starkly contrasts with the mysteriousnes of the plot, while large changes between frames accent the absolute immobility of the camera. For this last reason the authorial perspective is, to my senses, as Chekhovian as both the work’s title and its passive acceptance of something inexplicably forbidding. Although “The Lost Shoe” begins as a photographic sequence, its ultimate impact is decidedly fictional.

    

   

10. Raymond Federman’s Double or Nothing (1972), which resembles Michals in making the page itself the basic narrative unit; however, instead of photographs, Federman uses language shaped into a wide variety of one-page visual typewritten forms that, like The Sweetmeat Saga, had to be offset directly for publication (and are likewise fundamentally about the possibilities of arraying typewritten words on 8 1/2″ by 11″ pages, in the historic era just before computer-assisted printing!). Through these set-pieces, which reveal an unfaltering capacity for formal invention, Federman weaves several sustained preoccupations, including the narrator’s immigration to America, his poverty here, his obsessive memories, his parsimonious passion for noodles. No other “novel” looks like Federman’s contemporary reworking of Kafka’s Amerika, which was written fifty years before; yet no other in this selection is quite so rich in traditional sorts of “content.” (Mention of Federman would be incomplete without acknowledging his bilingual masterpiece, Take It or Leave It [1976], which is likewise about coming to America. However, because this text entwines two languages, it should be available on audiocassettes in addition to its initial form as print, thus putting to shame all those cassette bowdlerizations of pop books that were themselves bowdlerized before ever getting into print!

     

    

11. Madeline Gins’s Word Rain (1969), which by now is commonly regarded as the most extreme example of self-reflexive fiction. Steve Katz, writing recently in Michigan Quarterly Review, characterized it as “a playful, serene book that puts self-reflexivity to rest forever.” The first sign of this book’s unusual concerns and its equally rare humor is its extended subtitle: “(or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigations to G,R,E,T,A,G,A,R,B,O, It Says”; a second is the incorporation of several concerns indigenous to other books on this list—special languages, expressive design, extrinsically imposed forms. “The saddest thing is that I have to use words,” announces Gins’s narrator, not only echoing the opening sentence of Ford Madox Ford’s fictional study of human opacity, The Good Soldier (1915), but also exemplifying that Gertrude Steinian paradox of using language to reveal both the limitations of language and the reading process.

    Rather than developed in any step-by-step way, this last theme of linguistic opacity is reiterated in every section of Word Rain suggesting that the indicatively unpaginated book is best read in snatches as opposed to straight through. (The same advice can be tendered to anyone facing Finnegans Wake.) That style that is also the book’s subject is revealed through a variety of opaque styles, one of which is a classic example of verbal elegance entwined with incomprehensibility:

    Each word on the page seemed ossified. The word face was a stone. The word guess was a flint. The words a, the, in, by, up, it, were pebbles. The word laughter was marble. Run was cartilage. Shelf was bone. Talk was an oak board. See was made of quartz. The word refrigerator was enameled. The word attention was concrete. The word iron was iron. The word help was wrought-iron. The word old was crag. The word touch was brick. The word read was mica and I was granite.

    I have read this passage aloud dozens of times in the course of lectures, and have never ceased to marvel at its purity.

    In the pages of Word Rain are numerous inventive displays of printed material: lists of unrelated words with dots between them, whole sides filled mostly with dashes where words might otherwise be, pseudo-logical proofs, passages in which the more mundane expressions are crossed out, an appendix of “some of the words (temporary definitions) not included,” even a photographed hand holding both sides of a printed page, and a concluding page of print-over-print that reads at its bottom: “This page contains every word in the book.” Though Word Rain suffers from a peril of its theme—a linguistic resistance that prevents most readers from discovering its purposes and from entering its imaginative world—it will always be an American classic to me.

     

    

12. Frank Kuenstler’s Lens (1964, and thus slightly earlier that the other books mentioned here), which is the most sustained example I know of prose acoherence (which is the literary analogue of musical atonality), not only from word to word but at times also from letter to letter:
    

    mm.Pris. metier.AAA. prime.Airies. numbers.Racquet. comma.Dei. rr.1919

    This opening line establishes a style that is sustained to similar widths for 81 pages, each with type ten inches high. Only recently did I become aware of this book, which contains the sort of audacious innovation we associate with the American imagination at its finest.

     

    

13. Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (1967 is a book-length ironic fiction about an exhibition full of objects similar to his famous early sculpture of a soft hamburger, all placed into a Lower East Side store a few years before—the book bearing as much resemblance to its subject as those objects did to what they purport to represent. (Why Oldenburg spends so much time with world-famous sculpture and the like, when he could become a great avant-garde writer, utterly mystifies me.)

OTHER TITLES TOWARD A SECOND VOLUME (OR COMPUTER DISC):

• John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), which represents the apex of his career as an experimental fictioner.
• Nicholas Delbanco’s Consider Sappho Burning (1969); ditto.
• Steve Katz’s The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1967); ditto.
• Ron Sukenick’s The Death of the Novel (1968); ditto.
• Kenneth King’s uncollected prose (which a small press run by me has been trying to put into print for years now, in spite of persistent neglects and scandals at funding agencies)

YET OTHER TITLES TOWARD A THIRD WHATEVER:

Willard Bain’s Informed Sources (1969), Frederick Barthelme’s Rangoon (1971), Stanley Berne’s The Unconscious Victorious (1969), Marvin Cohen’s A Self-Devoted Friend (1967), S. Foster Damon’s The Moulton Tragedy (1970), Wally Depew’s Once (1971), Irvin Faust’s The Steagle (1967), Dick Higgins’s A Book About Love & War & Death (1972), Harry Mathews’s Tlooth (1966), Edward Ruscha’s Crackers (1969), Lucas Samaras’s Samaras Album (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Nuclear Love (1972), Arlene Zekowski’s Seasons of the Mind (1969).

TOWARD A FOURTH:

Three anthologies that should be credited with efforts to establish taste, rather than exploit reputations previously established: Jerry Bowles’s This Book Is a Movie (1971), Eugene Wildman’s Experiments in Prose (1969), and my own Future’s Fictions (1971).

Canadian addenda are worth including, if you consider, as I still do, Anglophone Canadian literature to be a neglected zone within American English-language literature: bp Nichol’s Two Novels (1969) and Chris Scott’s Bartleby (1971), in addition to M. Vaughn-James’s Elephant (1970) and The Projector (1971), both of which by now seem to be precursors for the more accomplished visual-verbal fictions of Paul Zelevansky (an American).

By the late 1980s [and even two decades later], I look back upon these books and thus this period of 1966 to 1972 as a time when a developing avant-garde fortunately found publishing channels. Nearly all of these titles came from profit-making publishers, in sum reminding us that, even though manuscripts for similarly innovative books of fiction exist today, we don’t see them as often from either commercial houses or those smaller publishers dependent upon grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. At a time when mediocrity (of different kinds) prevails, it is salutary to remember what had been and thus could be done.

This essay is the best I can do for you now, David, contributing to your theme of rediscovering lost fiction without succumbing to your unnecessary requirements for uniformity. Should the conventions of your Rediscoveries II require you to attribute this baker’s dozen to a single author, consider the Great Avant-God who teaches at the University of Skies (and, alas, does not seem to be around much anymore).