Sukenick

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
July 25, 2004
Ronald Sukenick, 72, Writer Who Toyed With the Rules,
Dies
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
 
Ronald Sukenick, an American writer whose work dealt
playfully and self-referentially with the conventions
of fiction, died on Thursday at his home in New York
City. He was 72.

The cause was inclusion body myositis, a rare muscle
disease, said his wife, the writer Julia Frey.

Mr. Sukenick tried to reflect what he saw as an
American loss of faith in traditional values as
expressed by the counterculture that evolved in the
1960's. His first novel, "Up" (Dial, 1968), was the
story of a writer named Ronnie Sukenick who is writing
a novel and believes that fiction is nothing more than
markings on paper. The book ends with Ronnie telling
the reader: "I'm going to finish this today. . . .
I've had enough of this. I'm just playing with words
anyway, what did you think I was doing?"

In his next book, "The Death of the Novel, and Other
Stories" (Dial, 1969), Mr. Sukenick explained that "in
the world of post-realism," all the absolutes of
traditional fiction "have become absolutely
problematic." He continued: "The contemporary writer -
the writer who is acutely in touch with the life of
which he is a part - is forced to start from scratch:
Reality doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality
doesn't exist."

In a review of the book that parodied the author's
self-conscious technique, John Leonard wrote in The
New York Times: "The Reviewer wishes that Mr. Sukenick
were not as interesting as Mr. Sukenick thinks he is.
But Mr. Sukenick has an enormous amount of talent, and
therefore is interesting, and the Reviewer begrudges
him that."

Although not popularly accessible, Mr. Sukenick
persisted throughout his life in pushing at the
boundaries of fictional form, even playing with
typography and the blank spaces between his printed
words to represent what he saw as the breakdown in
human communication. He came to be recognized both in
academic circles and by his peers as a leading
representative of innovation.

The further darkening of his vision, always relieved
by his sense of humor, was reflected in "Long Talking
Bad Conditions Blues" (1979), in which a fragment of
the book's single long sentence, broken into
paragraphs, reads, "no aims no expectations no hopes
and liked it that way," and in his autobiographical
nonfiction narrative "Down and In: Life in the
Underground" (Beech Tree Books, 1987), a tour of the
1980's counterculture from the vantage point of
Manhattan's bars.

Using the leverage of his successful teaching career,
he encouraged other writers with similar bents. In
1974 he helped start the Fiction Collective, a
publishing cooperative, and in 1977 he founded the
American Book Review to focus attention on writers
outside the mainstream.

In 2002, a year after the publication of his most
recent novel, an e-book titled "Cows" (altX Press), he
received the Morton Zabel Award for innovative writing
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which
cited him for pushing "the formal possibilities of
American fiction to its limits" and in the process
"illuminating new pathways to the center of the human
psyche."

He was born on July 14, 1932, in Brooklyn, where his
father, Louis, was a dentist. He attended Midwood High
School and Cornell and Brandeis Universities,
receiving his doctorate in English literature in 1962.
His thesis became his first published book, "Wallace
Stevens: Musing the Obscure" (N.Y.U. Press, 1967), a
study of the poet.

Mr. Sukenick and his first wife, the former Lynn
Luria, a poet, divorced in 1984 after 23 years of
marriage. In addition to Ms. Frey, whom he married in
1992, he is survived by a sister, Gloria, of
Manhattan.

In 1956 Mr. Sukenick began his long teaching career as
a lecturer at Brandeis. Later he taught at Hofstra,
City College, Sarah Lawrence, and in France and
Israel. From 1975 to 2002 he was a professor of
English at the University of Colorado at Boulder,
where he was also director of creative writing until
1977 and director of the publications center from 1986
to 1999.

He was also a member of the executive council of the
Modern Language Association and from 1975 to 1977
chairman of the board of the Coordinating Council of
Little Magazines.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/obituaries/25sukenick.html?8br

Thanks for bringing that to our attention.  Links ...

http://www.mosaicman.com/

http://www.altx.com/int2/suk.html

http://www.flashpointmag.com/sukeint1.htm

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/sukenick.html

http://www.culturevulture.net/Books/Narrologues.htm

http://www.princeton.edu/~euphorb/Issues/Spring96/works/BOCO.html

Raymond Federman still alive?  Thanks again ...

--- The Great Quail <quail at libyrinth.com> wrote:

> Just a note -- American postmodern writer Ronald
> Sukenick just died. Author of "Up" and "98.6," he
> also helped found the American Book Review and FC2
> press.
> 
> I know that Sukenick is hardly ever mentioned around
> here, but he's certainly a "bird of a feather," so
> to speak.


		
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