The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction, and Making Believe: Philosophical Reflections on Fiction, and Style and Structure in the Novel: An Introduction
"Reminding readers that fictions are provisional realities and not bedrock truth is the essence of self-apparent writing," declares Jerome Klinkowitz, who, as the prolific seismologist of disruptions in contemporary, and what he calls postcontemporary, culture, is otherwise chary of essences. He presents 7"Ae SelfApparent Word as the culminating triptych to a series of meditations that includes Literary Disruptions (1975, revised 1980) and TAe American 1960s (1980). But much of the rest of Klinkowitz's vast output is likewise a description and celebration of a radical shift in American sensibilities during the past two decades. Klinkowitz has been the Harold Rosenberg to a literary movement he likens to abstract expressionism, the foremost apologist for "innovative fiction," by which he means writing that rejects realist conventions of representationalism. Refusing to treat the signifier as a mere means toward apprehending some extratextual signified, such literature is deliberately foregrounded. In Klinkowitz's vitreous metaphor, its medium is opaque and not transparent; its words are self-apparent, not invisible windows on a stable, external universe. TAe SelfApparent Word studies and champions novels that never indulge in the puerile game of trompe l'oeil, that never allow us to forget that they are sequences of words. Klinkowitz invokes a kind of truth-in-packaging criterion to determine whether a story by Ronald Sukenick merits inclusion in his new canon: "If the memory deals in language rather than in signs, if it is the word itself which is recalled rather than its cumbersome worldly object or event, then 'Momentum' is self-apparent fiction." Klinkowitz's valorization of fictions that are their own dramas leads him