Ronald Sukenick: The Death of the Novel (1969)

In the short stories collected in The Death of the Novel, Ronald Sukenick situates his particular brand of metafiction within the political conflicts of the late 1960s. Many of these stories feature a narrator named Sukenick, an author-character whose life as a part-time academic, leftist sympathizer, and (unfortunately) sexist womanizer resembles the real Sukenick’s life. Metafictional navel-gazing is therefore an inevitable aspect of the collection, but Sukenick’s preoccupation with improvisation undoes any sense of a fixed autobiographical self. Sukenick writes, “We improvise our novels as we improvise our lives.” Through the sheer speed of composition, Sukenick aims to escape the confines of traditional literary form and of subjectivity. His most important predecessor would be Jack Kerouac, who famously taped sheets of paper together to create a roll that could continuously flow through his typewriter as he composed On the Road. Like Kerouac’s novel, Sukenick’s stories have an undeniable forward momentum, as well as an often glaring dearth of craft and refinement. In two of the stories, Sukenick takes advantage of tape recording to capture “live” composition. “Roast Beef: A Slice of Life” is merely a transcription of a recording of a chaotic, banal conversation Sukenick has with his wife during dinner time. The story “Momentum” also is presented as a transcription of a recording, and starts as if hitting the record button on the machine: “okay here we go.” Near the beginning, Sukenick states his goal for the literary experiment: “i want to say this as it comes without premeditation because i want to say it before i lose it or not so much say it as tell it tell it to myself so i’ll have it down so that i can come back to it again and recapture it so the speed of the tape is my form.” The story attempts to capture the “chaos of [Sukenick’s] mind,” the sequence of present moments that are always slipping away, and the end product is a barrage of fragments from Sukenick’s life. The story “The Death of the Novel” offers a more thorough explanation of Sukenick’s goals. In typical metafictional fashion, the piece begins with a discourse on the “contemporary post-realistic novel.” Sukenick writes, “The contemporary writer – the writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part – is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist.” He adds, “Time is reduced to presence, the content of a series of discontinuous moments. Time is no longer purposive, and so there is no destiny, only chance. Reality is, simply, our experience and objectivity is, of course, an illusion. Personality, after passing through a phase of awkward self-consciousness, has become, quite minimally, a mere locus for our experience. In view of these annihilations, it should be no surprise that literature, also, does not exist--how could it?” Such reflections on literature within the text are more dramatically motivated than in most metafictional works because the narrator has been hired as a part-time teacher to give “an advanced honors seminar on The Death of the Novel.” The lectures he gives his bored, stoned students therefore often return in his story. The social and political turmoil of the late 1960s clearly influenced Sukenick’s formulation of this literary project. In addition to making reference to hippies, diggers, and yippies, the story discusses the State’s persecution of the leftist underground and includes news reports about the student movement, antiwar protests, and anti-antiwar protests. A very specific historical context lurks behind statements such as: “Reality has become a literal chaos. It has escaped our definitions. . . . If reality exists, it doesn’t do so a priori, but only to be put together. Thus one might say reality is an activity, of which literature is part, an important part, but one among many.” Sukenick adds, “Freedom in this context can mean only one thing, the freedom to create, and to create continuously, out of the fragmented, contradictory, anomalous, and progressively dissociating elements of our experience, a life that is coherent as a work of art is coherent, that continually comes together as it continuously comes apart.” The end of the story involves a return to the chaos of reality. The text stages its own (necessary) failure when Sukenick gives himself one hour to finish the piece, and then pushes himself to meet his self-imposed deadline, writing things such as, “Go on” and “Faster.” But the phones ring and his life intrudes anyway: ”Everything’s blowing up, falling to pieces. Art dissolves back into life. Chaos. It’s not the way I planned it.” The story ends in a favorite metafictional manner: “So long. End of story.” The final story, “The Birds,” is the collection’s most experimental and opaque piece. Most of the text consists of linguistic play on its titular subject, with sections on the names of birds, bird jokes, and bird symbolism. Sukenick compares this improvisational chaos (of dubious quality) directly to the Watts Towers, repeating a description of that work: “Built entirely without design precedent or orderly planning, created bit by bit on sheer impulse, a natural artist’s instinct, and the fantasy of the moment.” Sukenick also links his aesthetic project to the politics of May ’68 by including long news reports about the unfolding of the events of that month, from the occupation of the Sorbonne to the erecting of the barricades to the spread of mass striking. For Sukenick, May ’68 demonstrates the ability of spontaneous action to escape the power of existing forms, and underscores that “we must remain open to the unknown.” As the reports state: “THE PRINICIPAL THREAT LIES IN THE SPONTANEOUS, POPULAR AND UTTERLY UNCONTROLLED NATURE OF THE MOVEMENT.” “SOMETHING HAS BEEN CREATED THAT IS IRREVERSIBLE. THERE WILL BE NO GOING BACK TO THE STATUS QUO.”