F/32 INTER/E/VIEWS
ANQ Magazine, OCTOBER 1992
FICTION'S FUTURE
Q: When did fiction's future begin in these United States?
Fiction's future began with Eurudice's f/32, published by Fiction Collective Two in Normal, Illinois, in 1990.
Consider its exemplary genesis.
Eurudice's f/32 began when Francois Rabelais, in a moment that Hegel would one day call World Historical, wrote Gogol's "The Nose." Kathy Acker plagiarized "The Nose" by Rabelais but called it "The History of the Eye." The post-punk rock group The Pixies wrote a song called "Debaser" based upon the assumption that "The History of the Eye" by Kathy Acker was plagiarized from Luis Bunuel's Chien Andalou. (Like the Mekongs—who wrote "Empire of the Senseless" but claimed never to have read Acker—the Pixies claimed never to have read Acker.) Acker was the opposite of nonplussed. She was plussed. It was thus left to Jacques Lacan to fall asleep while watching Bunuel's Chien Andalou and listening to the Pixies on AKG holographic headphones, to fall asleep in his sleep, double sommeil, and dream of a beautiful Greek woman, Eurudice, born mise en abime on the isle of Lesbos. He dreamt that by the age of eight she had rewritten all the books in her father's library, including Homer, Shakespeare, and Beckett. He dreamt that she ran off to Hollywood at fourteen, planning to live as a guest with other famous exotic women of distant lands, like Madame Nhu, who find Hollywood congenial. Finally, with Lacan in REM nirvana, all sorrow annihilated, Eurudice wrote f/32.
This is the regimen for any and all plausible novels of the future.
Q: Will the fiction of the future be polemical?
The fiction of the future can be polemical, stake out some turf and defend it, or it can be part of the rest of the cottage cheese (small curd) of American culture.
Q: What is this Fiction Collective Two, brave publishers of the future's fiction?
The Fiction Collective came about in the mid-seventies following the brief blip on the screen that was the Counterculture, because of a reactionary backlash against innovative fiction in particular and alternative culture in general. Yes, there was a time when Kapital could hope to make a profit off Steve Katz or Frank Zappa, but there was no real commitment to avant-culture among the New York publishing establishment. This was so because the ideas of writers like Ron Sukenick, Alan Singer, Gilbert Sorrentino, and Kathy Acker were fundamentally revolutionary at the level of consciousness and finally corrosive of dominant, mid-twentieth century, Fortress America ideology. So when the Moral Majority and that queer self-destructive bird Moral Fiction appeared on the scene in the seventies, the media was happy to shrug its collective shoulders, sigh "Whoa! Bad dream!" and start the process of pulping anything that didn't look like one of Padrone Hemingway's avatars.
Fiction Collective Two is an avant-garde dissident publisher because the banality, the deceit, the schizophrenia, the lifelessness of hyper-real Disneyesque high-tech life makes it rage. Precisely: the lifelessness of life makes it rage. See it rise on its powerful not-for-profit legs! I would like to think that we (FC2) write as we do to say to whoever might be out there and in need of moral support, "Hey, over here! Don't give up! Life might still turn out to be original after all!"
Q: Was William Gass ever right about anything?
No. He's the wrongest theoretician of the American avant-garde. But what wrongness in particular do you ponder?
Q: I ponder "there's nothing new about the avant-garde" and statements comme ca.
Actually, Gass is right, but only at a level that is obvious and trivial. Of course, there's little really "new" about the avant-garde. Technically, it would be difficult to find something "new" in "postmodernism" or whatever you want to call that "it" we're after. (Isn't "it" finally simply the unspecifiable Other which stands opposed to What We Have? The opposite of the present failure which we can't seem to defeat? In other words, isn't the avant-garde the bag from which we draw our desire for the most beleaguered of notions, freedom? creativity?)
It would be difficult to find something in postmodernism that isn't in Rabelais, Stern, Cervantes. Newness is the wrong issue. Nor is it any more interesting to try to say that Realism or mimesis or the doctrine of representation is evil or boring. Finally, Realism is innocent. We're all innocent. None sins. None I say. None.
However, what Gass doesn't seem much interested in wondering about is a situation in which a fictional discourse becomes part of a broader ideological confrontation, a situation in which a given literary aesthetic becomes a State Fiction. This is what Bakhtin describes so well. Language and certainly literature are always the site of social dialogue or struggle. So one chooses not to write Realism because one chooses not to be in complicity with the state form which has appropriated it. There is no room for this kind of discussion in Gass's comments on the avant-garde; his ability to describe the current scene is fragmentary and impoverished to the extent that it can't accommodate such a discussion. He's an aesthete.
Q: Isn't it true that fiction's future as you describe it will mean that only academics will read it?
Your question about "academic audience" touches on another frequent criticism of FC2 and the avant-garde in general. It is said that we distance ourselves from the "main body" in a way that is self-destructive and implicitly elitist. False and wrong. We want an audience. In fact, we want everyone to love us, to come on over, boogie down, and play that funky music. But we want a LIVING audience. We don't want an audience that is looking to be reassured that its world and its notions about the real are the true and only possible world and notions. We want an audience for whom the real is that which opens into the possible. Like Mahayana Buddhists, we admire the "free play of energy in voidness."
Q: What are the immediate problems for fiction's future?
Genetic: how to live. Our problem is what the problem was for Impressionists, Imagists, Anarcho-syndicalists, the Wobblies, Vorticists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Pre-Raphaelites, Romantics, German Idealists, members of the Babylonian Captivity, the Boxer Rebellion, Geronimo and the Apache uprising, Renaissance Hermeticists, the Black Mountain School, Beatniks, the Dali Lama, hippies, yippies, some schisms within the Parent Teacher Association, and any other freethinking and generally heretical group you can think of: mitosis. Or is it cytokinesis?
By Curtis White, ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY—NORMAL
f/32: The Second Coming
A Novel by Eurudice, 1993, Virago Press
A cunt on her own. Seperated from her excessive owner she [the cunt] launches into adventures beyond imagination.
"It's wonderful to see a woman not interiorising male fear of her, especially her body, but rather confronting that fear, fighting it and celebrating her body and her sexuality by creating a fabulous and funny tale" - Kathy Acker
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