GRGR(5) Katje: in close up

[rj]

Paul, Terrance:

> 
> > Referring back again to rj's point about P's demonstration of certain
> > advantages of writing over film, wasn't there a lot of talk around '73 of
> > the novel's being in decline  as an art form? We don't hear much talk of
> > that nowadays, do we?
> >
> >                         P.
> 
> YUP! But it wasn't novelists talking, it was Critical Theorists and Literary
> Critics. And the "decline" began after the war or Post Modern.

Not so!

BARTH, John. ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’. Atlantic Monthly 220,
August, 1967. (Reproduced in FEDERMAN, Raymond (ed.),  _Surfiction:
Fiction . . . Now and Tomorrow_, pp. 19-33. Chicago: Swallow Press,
1975.)

BARTHES, Roland. 'The Death of the Author' (1968). In _Image, Music,
Text_. Translated and edited by Steven Heath. London: Flamingo, 1984
(1977).

It worries me that the distinction Terrance is making between
"novelists" and "Critical Theorists and Literary Critics" is an
artificial one at best, and somewhat discriminatory at worst. (Literary
Critic is not an animal!) Don Barthelme also seems to be a case in
point. (And it's marvellously convenient how those three names sit
together so nicely in a bibliography!) Part of the whole thrust of
Literary Theory since de Saussure and Shklovsky is that all text --
critical, literary and 'factual' -- is narrativised and subjective.
Moreover, Derrida's and Lyotard's stuff doesn't fit into either box
(fiction/non) most of the time, and Barthe's S/Z is a whole heap of fun
to read, much moreso than William Gass's ponderous literary blockbuster
'The Tunnel' imo. And if you don't think Pynchon's a "Theorist" or
"Critic" then you're missing out on a lot of the substance of _GR_ (eg.
the New Turkic Alphabet section, Mitch Prettyplace, the glorifications
of German expressionist cinema, "See Ishmael Reed." Etc.) But I digress.

The backlash against the species of critical *and* aesthetic despair
that Paul mentions was quick. (Actually it was the mid-60s, but there
had been a long build-up even before.) Ronald Sukenick's title story in
_Death of the Novel and Other Stories_ (Dial, New York, 1969) was a
swift postmodern rejoinder to Barthes and Barthelme and Barth. And what
you'll find by about '73, in America as here, is an almost manufactured
resurgence and critical valorisation of literary fiction, particularly,
*new* *American* literary fiction, as a medium. The most obvious example
of many is

KLINKOWITZ, Jerome. Literary Disruptions: The Making of
Post-Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1975. 

Klinkowitz’s opening chapter, subtitled ‘The Death of the Death of the
Novel’, opens with the assertion that “Fiction breeds its own
continuity.” (p. 1) And both Federman and Sukenick were working hard at
the time to construct the literary manifestations of and cement them
into this postmodern genre. For a lot of reasons I don't think they were
at all successful, but that is neither here nor there. Meanwhile,
others, like Pynchon, Gaddis and DeLillo, just went on hammering out
masterful literary (/critical) narratives themselves. And, of course,
Barth himself later recanted (‘The Literature of Replenishment:
Postmodernism and the Rebirth of the Novel’, Atlantic Monthly 245.1,
January, 1980), though even this was not enough to resuscitate his
ailing 'novelistic' voice.

best