In Their Own Words: The Collective Presents Itself

In 1975, during its third year of existence and second of publishing books, The Fiction Collective issued an anthology representative of its work. Called Statements, edited by Jonathan Baumbach, and introduced with a “Statement” by Ronald Sukenick, it would be the first of five such volumes assembled during the initial quarter century of the group’s life. Since then, readers have been able to track the Collective’s evolution through Statements 2: New Fiction (1977, edited by Baumbach and Peter Spielberg, with opening comments this time from Robert Coover), American Made (1986, edited by Mark Leyner, Curtis White, and Thomas Glynn, with an Introduction from critic Larry McCaffery), Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993, with McCaffery entirely in charge), and In the Slipstream (1999, edited by Ronald Sukenick and Curtis White, who supplied an Introduction describing the transition to Fiction Collective Two as a complement to Jonathan Baumbach’s “Personal History” of the Collective’s earlier years).

Together, these volumes offer a great resource for scholarship: well over one hundred contributions from seventy-eight authors, framed by several thousand words of commentary from Baumbach, Sukenick, Coover, McCaffery, and White. This breakdown itself offers clues for study: the relatively few writers who appear more than once; others, even fewer in number, whose commercial success throughout this period insured they need never publish a volume of their own with the Collective, yet who lent their authority through appearance here; and finally the smallest group of all, those who began their publishing careers with the Collective and were subsequently embraced by conventional houses. That’s the individual side of the Collective’s efforts. Within the broad sweep of action that these five volumes comprise, there emerge two themes: how the Fiction Collective was developing on its own terms, and how that development fit in (or didn’t) with the ongoing literary history of fiction in America, three decades of which during the late twentieth century constitute a critically interesting period.

“At the end of the sixties there was an idea in the air that fiction had become impossible,” Ronald Sukenick writes in introductory commentary to the first volume. “Fiction was, after all, only a product of the imagination and not the ‘real fact’ of journalism. In any case, Philip Roth had told us that reality had become more incredible than fiction. One heard a great deal about ‘the literature of exhaustion’ and ‘the death of the novel’” (8). In 1975, these words would have had an especially familiar ring to them, as they parallel the opening paragraph to Sukenick’s “The Death of the Novel” on page 41 of The Death of the Novel and Other Stories that was published in 1969 by the Dial Press and used as an epigraph to the anthology Innovative Fiction, over a hundred thousand copies of which were sold by Dell Publishing Company (Sukenick’s paperback publisher at the time) in 1972. “In a curious turnabout,” he continues in this recapitulation, “writers in the seventies—those in this volume among them—have learned to profit from what is by definition an impossible situation.” In a formulation adopted from his own novella, Sukenick draws the equation that would create the fiction of a new era: “If everything is impossible, then anything becomes possible. What we have now is a fiction of the impossible that thrives on its own impossibility, which is no more or less impossible these days than, say, city life, politics, or peace between the sexes. To paraphrase Beckett, it can’t go on it must go on it goes on” (8).

Having quoted the same source to which this co-founder of The Fiction Collective alludes, the editors of Innovative Fiction anticipate what he will say in 1975, given the necessity Sukenick’s sense of literary history invokes:

What you have just read is a statement of the problem the modern writer faces, but it is also the opening to Ronald Sukenick’s novella, The Death of the Novel, and thus what is a philosophical statement of the problem is conversely a technical reaction to it. Sukenick has written...