In the late 1960s when fiction writer and theorist Ronald Sukenick began his career as a novelist, fiction was at a crucial stage of its development as an art form. Most critics and fictioneers who did not speak of the death of fiction were convinced of its exhaustion. Feeling that writers had followed the novel form to the end of its potential, they were left with an art that was doomed to self-conscious repetition.

What could be accomplished in the ancient art of storytelling that had not already been done well, several times over? Clever recombinations of plots and characters, parodies of traditional forms, and emphasis on word play were still possible, and novels that were studies on the process of writing novels became more popular. Apart from these new twists on familiar materials, it appeared to many that it would soon be inaccurate to speak of the novel's progress.

Like other new novelists of the period, Sukenick recognized that the tradition--a standardized way of looking at an art form--had become one of fiction's strongest enemies. "There are all these talented people around trying to write in this form which doesn't suit them at all, so that instead of releasing their energies it blocks them out," Sukenick told interviewer Joe David Bellamy in 1970 (interview collected in The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers).

"The tradition was itself a fiction, a result of our selective perception, and needed to be revised. By the point some form has become certified Literature it has become a formula useable in prefabricated repetitions. But experience is never prefab. It is immediate, metamorphic, and unpredictable. Writing that tries to package experience can only falsify it. Literature is packaged experience. You can and must learn a lot from the best Literature but you don't learn anything new from it, unless it happens to be new to you. So half the fight when you're writing is to avoid Literature. The other half is to find forms that accommodate, discover, and even create your particular experience."

Page created by Mason Adams. Last updated on May 5, 2000.