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LITERATURE
XIX, 1
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pp. $8.95.
Jerry Bumpus, Things in Place. New York: Fiction Collective, 1975. 141 pp.
$8.95.
Clarence Major, Reflex and Bone Structure.New York: Fiction Collective,
1975. 145 pp. $8.95.
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Bumpus' stories deal not only with the precariousness of order, but
with the violent, impersonal nature of human contact today. His
people rarely have significant encounters; more often they are shown
confronting animals (either literally, as in "In the Mood of Zebras,"
or figuratively, as in "A Lament for Wolves"), or people who are
metaphorically transformed by language into animals or insects (thus
the motorcycle gang in Bumpus' title story is described as "a storm of
hornets" and "giant insects").
Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structureis a strange blend of
Barthelme, Robbe-Grillet, and Mickey Spillane; perhaps the best
comparison, however, is with Robert Coover's metafictional story,
"The Magic Poker," which concerns a magician/writer who has
created an enchanted island and is desperately attempting to keep
things running without himself becoming lost within its operations.
Reflex shares with Coover's story the central narrative tension
between a writer and his creation, as well as its "montage method" of
presentation in which brief verbal sections appear before us without
transition or apparent connection-thus part one of Reflex is
appropriately entitled "A Bad Connection."These verbal episodes
depict events which range widely in tone from the highly erotic, to
the banal, to the sinister. Gradually a dual focus is established: on the
one hand, we have the elements of the "story-line," which centers
around a love triangle and two murders; on the other hand, we watch
the narrator putting the pieces of the story before us and selfconsciously analyzing his performance as he proceeds. The reader
knows at the outset of the book that the murders have occurred
("The scattered pieces of the bodies were found" flashes across page
one), and naturally expects the author to unravel the mystery behind
the murders; and, indeed, the narrator tells us that he is "a detective
trying to solve a murder" (p. 32). But like other recent writers who
have appropriated the detective novel for their own purposes
(Borges, Queneau, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet), Major uses this
format merely to entrap the reader into a puzzle which has no real
solution. "I can't explain how anything relates to anything else" (pp.
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15-16), says the narrator early in the novel, and this sort of
epistemological uncertainty is at the heart of Major's book. One of
the points being made by a great number of contemporary writers is
that previous novelistic conventions concerning personality, causeand-effect, and "explanations" of any kind are no longer credibleto paraphrase Barthelme, fragments are the only forms which we can
trust. The writer's job is no longer to try and create the specious
illusion of order by linking these fragments into meaningful
relationships; instead the writer may decide to arrange these
elements in a capricious, or blatantly invented, pattern and allow the
reader to arrange or rearrange, coming up with any solution which he
finds intriguing. When Major's narrator begins to present a scene
which may shed some light on the murders, he suddenly interjects, "I
simply refuse to go into details. Fragments can be all we have. To
make the whole. An archeologist might, of course, look for different
clues" (p. 17).
As in 98.6, then, the real interest of Major's book is in the
narrator's struggle to find a fictional form that will allow him to work
off his own tension. Meanwhile he is unable-or refuses-to supply
the usual descriptions and explanations; thus his characters remain
largely abstractions, their motivations mysterious, their personalities vague. At one point the narrator says of his principal character,
"I cannot help him if he refuses to focus. How can I be blamed for his
lack of seriousness?" (p. 42). In addition, the narrator constantly
reminds us of his own involvement in the creation of the text, as when
he announces of his three main characters: "Get this: Cora isn't
based on anybody. Dale isn't anything. Canada is just something I'm
busy making up. I am only an act of my own imagination" (p. 85).
Despite the absence of the familiar novelistic devices of tension and
character development, Major's novel, with its spare prose so often
full of eroticism and understated desperation, usually manages to
keep the reader's interest.
Series IV: Take It or Leave It by Raymond Federman, The
Talking Room by Marianne Hauser, The Comatose Kids by Seymour
Simckes.* The fourth series was a "good news/bad news" group. It
*Raymond Federman, Take It or Leave It. New York: Fiction Collective, 1976.
Unpaged. $11.95.
Marianne Hauser, The Talking Room. New York: Fiction Collective, 1976. 158
pages. $8.95.
Seymour Simckes, The Comatose Kids. New York: Fiction Collective, 1976.
114 pp. $8.95.
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entire work cancels itself out not only as it progresses, but also in
advance!"
The beauty and magic of Hauser's The Talking Room is difficult
to analyze. The key would seem to be in the book's extraordinary
prose patterns, which create in their complex, interrelated images a
sustained vision of loneliness, the desire for love and the necessity for
escape, and, always, a haunting, dreamlike lyricism. "Again I can
hear their voices coming nonstop from the talking room downstairs. I
hear them through the rumble of the trucks in the night rain as I lie on
my back between moist sheets, listening. And I know they are
talking about me" (p. 1). This passage opens the book and
introduces the principal characters: the narrator is a chubby,
pregnant, 13-year-old girl who may (or may not) be a test-tube baby;
she narrates the book while lying in her bed upstairs, listening to the
conversations of her mother, J, and her mother's possessive lesbian
lover, V. Meanwhile the girl's transistor radio provides a telling
counterpoint to the emotional violence that is constantly erupting
downstairs in a house that is full of mirrorsand echoes. Mixing dream
with desire, the book's narrative framework is at once both utterly
fantastic and believable; Hauser also succeeds in creating a novel
that is comically satirical and still full of compassion. The
relationship between J and V, for example, is a poignant portrait of
the destructive impulses which often lie at the heart of our desire for
love and communication. This book is certainly one of the
Collective's major successes and deserves much greater attention
than it has so far received.
Simckes' The Comatose Kids demonstrates that although a
writer need no longer provide realistic characters, credible plots, or
clear relationships, he must still provide a voice which the reader will
want to listen to. Both Take It or Leave It and The Talking Room
succeed, finally, because the reader is likely to find the delirious or
lyrical quality of the prose compelling. A similar phenomenon keeps
us reading the experimental works of, say, William Gass, John
Barth, Donald Barthelme, and John Hawkes. But in Simckes' book,
the absence of traditional narrative elements is not made up for by
either ingenious formal manipulations or by energetic, lively
language. As with so many other Collective novels, the plot here
revolves around a central character (Doktor Tschisch, a 93-year-old
psychiatrist, whose speeches occasionally have their moments of wit)
who is attempting to create an imaginative extension of himself. Dr.
Tschisch only has three days to live and, because he seems to sense
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$8.95.
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*George Chambers, Null Set and Other Stories. New York: Fiction Collective,
1977. 216 pp. $8.95.
Andree Connors, Amateur People. New York: Fiction Collective, 1977. 159
$8.95.
pp.
Steve Katz, Moving Parts. New York: Fiction Collective, 1977. Each story
paged separately. $8.95.
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pp. 22-23).
As I noted at the outset of this essay, it is still probably too early
to come to any final conclusions about how important an influence in
contemporary fiction the Fiction Collective can become. Certainly
not all of its books have been successes, and even its best books
aren't "ambitious" in the sense that critics want important books to
be. Judged by almost any standard except sales, however, it does
seem evident that the Fiction Collective has succeeded in publishing
several books which are among the most significant American works
of the past half-dozen years or so; and it has continued to publish
these works despite the general lack of attention or sympathetic
reaction from reviewers or critics. Given the worsening options for
contemporary writers, cooperatives of this kind may be absolutely
necessary if innovative fiction is going to maintain the momentum it
has generated in the past ten years. Therefore the Fiction
Collective's efforts are important not just because of what it succeeds
in accomplishing or fails to accomplish, but for what it can teach us
about possible alternatives for serious, nontraditional writers.
Larry McCaffery
San Diego State University
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