Notes Toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage

One: Conclusion: Amphibious Aesthetics

If we are witnessing at the creative peripheries of our culture the proliferation of a postgenre composition that questions the need for discussing such apparently singular species as, say, science fiction and postmodernism, we are also witnessing the proliferation of a postcritical writing that questions the need for discriminating between such apparently singular species as theory and fiction. We are witness-ing—and have been for at least the last thirty or forty years—what Steven Connor discusses as the slow “collapse of criticism into its object” (227). We are witnessing, that is, the advent of performative critifictions dedicated to effacing, or at least deeply and richly complicating, the accepted difference between privileged and subordinate discourses. The collage imagination at the core of such a gesture is one committed to liberating juxtaposition, mosaic, conflation, fusion and confusion, Frank-ensteinian fictions, cyborg scripts, centaur texts, the narratologically amphibious writings that embrace a poetics of beautiful monstrosity.

Two: Ronald Sukenick, 1972

We have to learn how to look at fiction as lines of print on a page and we have to ask whether it is always the best arrangement to have a solid block of print from one margin to the other running down the page from top to bottom, except for an occasional paragraph indentation. We have to learn to think about a novel as a concrete structure rather than as an allegory, existing in the realm of experience rather than in the realm of discursive meaning, and available to multiple interpretation or none, depending on how you feel about it . . .

Three: Milorad Pavíc, 1998

In his essay “The Beginning and the End of Reading—The Beginning and the End of the Novel,” Milorad Pavíc distinguishes between two kinds of art: nonreversible and reversible. Nonreversible art, such as traditional fiction, is unidirectional; instances “look like one-way roads on which everything moves from the beginning to the end, from birth to death” (143). Reversible art, on the other hand, such as architecture and sculpture, is prismatic, multi-directional, rhizomic; instances of these “enable the recipient to approach the work from various sides, or even to go around it and have a good look at it, changing the spot of the perspective, and the direction of the looking at it according to his [or her] own preference” (142). Pavíc endorses the latter variety, affirming that his goal in collaged works like Dictionary of the Khazars has been “to make literature, which is a nonreversible art, a reversible one”—one that pits itself against the deep-structure propulsion of narrative by rupturing its seemingly inflexible arc from birth to death while celebrating the strength of the human imagination (143).

Four: Friedrich Nietzsche, 1874

One day sitting at his writing desk in his Basel flat Friedrich Nietzsche will look at the pages of the manuscript on which he is working and grasp with resounding disappointment the architecture of every phrase is wrong his house of signs a ruin not the what of saying the how. He will look at the sheet of paper before him and all he will see is how every blocky paragraph is the color of ashes just another sentence in a language filled with them because every writer in his country has become a journalist wearing a blend-in essence and in the next breath it will come to him writing isn’t expansion but compression a texturing into fragment saying in seven sentences what everyone else says in a book saying in seven sentences what everyone else doesn’t say in a book employing the figure of aphorism and the form of collage to construct a particle philosophy for a particulate world bringing together what is shard and riddle and chance engineering with his flesh.

Five: Ronald Sukenick, 1975

This novel is based on the Mosaic Law the law of mosaics or how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes.

Six: Quotation as Chance

Both the structuring and the reading of collage fiction often involves an aleatoric component that recalls...