be interesting, or confuses us, but because he belongs to no school and stands resolutely apart from the 'ordinary' and 'traditional.' There may be in Hawkes a discernible 'aspiration toward popular narrative,' but that aspiration exists in tension with his dedication to 'austerities' that certify his vanguard status.
Hawkes is an important test case for anyone interested in these matters. If in some way Gertrude Stein embodies the spirit of an originary modernist avant-garde, then Hawkes may be said not to fit the pattern. Leslie Fiedler can speak as emphatically as he likes about Hawkes's unpopular merits, but he cannot make of Hawkes even a wayward son of Stein. For Hawkes exhibits neither the singlemindedness nor the aestheticism of that hermetic precursor. Whatever the austerities of his fiction, he composes narratives with more or less developing characters and something like a subject or a content. The atmosphere of dream that so pervades much of his work is pointedly purposeful, bespeaking psychic dislocation or evoking a sense of entrapment that has some discernible relation to circumstance. When he fails, one is aware of a gap between intention and execution, aura and substance, of the disparity, say, between the intensity of nightmarish dread and the causes that might account for it. Hawkes's novels demand to be read and considered in such terms. Absurdity figures prominently in the novels, but Hawkes nowhere -728- relies on it as an ostensibly adequate 'explanation' for anything. Though he demands a responsively attentive reader, he does not expect what William Gass 'a jaded eye,' which is to say, a reader 'for whom all the action, the incidents, the tension and suspense, are well-known and over and dead and gone,' the reader, as Gass has it, of 'Joyce and Beckett and Barth and Borges.' Hawkes's reader is eager to be moved, willing to be wracked by suspense. If the action is limited, the incident thin, it is nonetheless evoked as a something happening, and one suffers it as a cresting momentum that carries within it significant if sometimes unnameable consequences. One is not only intrigued, but drawn in.
Hawkes is an avant-garde writer principally in his handling of surfaces, in his refusal to provide the kinds of continuity and closure that ordinarily distract readers from the rewards of surface. Character in Hawkes is not a random collocation of traits and activities, but neither is it anything like a stable entity. It is a shape and a wordsurface suggesting but never quite embodying or delineating depths. In The Lime Twig a woman suffers and one is moved not by the meaning of her suffering or the depth of her reverie but by the austere evocation of her pain and bewilderment. In Second Skin (1963) a father kills himself, and one is moved not by his story — which we are never given — or by the impact of this deed on a young son: one is moved by the feverish accents and impeccably juxtaposed details of the telling — brief, resonant, almost tritely heartbreaking, but finally artifactual, a little arch, decidedly literary. In Travesty (1976) one is held not by the stale and tediously wicked ideas of the obsessed monologuist but by the sudden irruptions in the surface of his discourse, his linguistic for 'elbows of hot metal,' 'fields of oxygen,' and the 'grievous tabloidal gesture.' It is not that the ideas in such a novel do not exist for us, but that they are not as important as they would be in another sort of work, and that the characters associated with those ideas are frankly an occasion for the performance of certain imaginative resources. Hawkes is an avant-garde writer in the degree that he resists a full commitment to an expansive novelistic or illusionistic treatment of evolving characters and ideas. In the end, his primary interest in language and in the formal management of narrative surfaces ensures that he remain at once a serious artist and a minority writer whose effectiveness is at best intermittent. -729-
Though, in contrast to Hawkes, John Barth might aptly be described as the best-known little-read American novelist, he is unquestionably an avant-garde writer. Author of a famous essay on The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), Barth is dismayed that so many of his contemporaries continue to write in the manner of the nineteenthcentury realists, and asserts that 'to be technically out of date is likely to be a genuine defect.' Though sharply critical of phony experimentalism, he is frankly committed to an art 'that not many people can do: the kind that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas.' Sometimes dismissed as a merely academic writer performing outlandish feats for professors easily impressed by dexterous prestidigitations, he is nonetheless a writer of great earnestness and intellectual range whose fiction poses basic questions about the avant-garde in the United States. Is it true, as he contends, that the prodigious virtuosity of the writing he admires is compatible with a capacity to 'speak eloquently and memorably to our still- human hearts and conditions, as the great artists have always done'? Or is it the case that such ambitions can only distract the avant-garde writer from his true business, which is to astonish, delight, and impress? Barth is not alone in wishing it were possible to avoid stark dichotomies, but his work encourages them more than he will allow. Pages of Barth's novels and stories may be fun to read, but not many will accept that his extravagant fictions 'speak eloquently and memorably to our still-human hearts.'
Barth is chiefly celebrated as the author of the novels The SotWeed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966), two of the most fantastic and relentless works in American literature. They are, moreover, works that seem to have been written not so much to be read as contended with. They are quintessential university novels, directed at readers for whom books are at the center of experience and language itself defines what is most important about us. Drawing upon, parodying, imitating, and echoing the literature of the past, Barth's novels are at once boisterous and long-winded, exuberant and earnest, unbuttoned and self-conscious. Embodying what one critic nicely calls a 'visionary pedantry,' the novels are also apt at times to seem silly, self-indulgent, mythomaniacal, excessive. Brilliantly comic and endlessly inventive, they are by turns playful and obsessive, as one might expect from a writer for whom language games, para-730- doxes, and philosophical conundrums are never-ending sources of wonder. Barth is in fact largely if not exclusively preoccupied with the issue of fictiveness and the way that language continues to embody and embolden the fictions by which we live. In no sense a philosophical novelist, Barth is nonetheless deeply aware of philosophical issues and clearly aspires to ask questions about the relationship between fiction and authenticity, unwitting imitation and deliberate emulation. That he poses these questions with no prospect of arriving at an orderly exposition of the crucial issues, let alone an answer, attests only to the fact that he is a novelist, not a philosopher. That he is shamelessly prolix and self-contradictory attests to his appetite for the performative and exasperating.
Indeed, that appetite says more about Barth's avant-garde credentials than anything else. One does not read Barth to be uplifted or edified or instructed in the ways of the world. A novel that imagines all of Western history as a gigantic university in which persons are routinely obsessed with passing exams is, to be sure, an allegorical fiction, but it is hardly an attempt to make sense of the world beyond the confines of its own created universe. That there are obvious references to the 'real world' no one will doubt, but Giles Goat- Boy is more certainly an emblem of creation going about its not-so-usual business than a representation or a disquisition. The English critic Tony Tanner asks repeatedly for less 'emphasis' on 'the struggle or opposition between referentiality and reflexivity,' but it is the intention of the avant-garde writer to fuel that opposition. Of course the important question is not which work is more referential than another, but what qualities of mind and spirit are embodied in a particular book and what purposes — literary or human — they serve. Barth's Sot-Weed Factor interests us in its own peculiar ways, ways that have little to do with the interest we take in a novel by Saul Bellow. But its uniqueness and its interest are in part a function of the implicit challenge it poses to our interest in Bellow. If we conclude that a fiction about storytelling and mythmaking is finally tedious, intolerably self-absorbed, and only intermittently a vital expression of the thing it clearly wishes to be, we do not thereby admit to a preference for referential fiction but simply respond to particular failures or limitations in a Barth.
One cannot get away from the fact that failure, boredom, emo-731- tional limitation, and linguistic excess are often inherent in the very enterprise and intention of avant-garde fiction. As one almost-official spokesman for the American avant-garde, Ronald Sukenick, asserts, for his kind of contemporary writer, 'reality doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality doesn't exist.' Literature, he maintains, is dead; reading and writing constitute at most a 'considered boredom.' Another spokesman, Jerome Klinkowitz, celebrates fiction that refuses to delight in anything but 'the process' of composition itself, and has especial fondness for works that are insistently opaque, resist 'ulterior meanings,' and follow out their self-created patterns to 'illogical conclusions.' Like many other programmatic boosters and fellow travelers, such spokesmen are exclusively turned on by what they take to be the essentially oppositional posture of avantgarde fiction. John Barth's Letters (1979) is admired because it is longer than it needs or ought to be. William Gaddis's JR (1975) is touted for the very trivialization, arbitrariness, and repetitiveness that make it all but unreadable. Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (1979) is praised for its steady undermining of any interest a reader might take in its story, its characters, its topical references. That such works, in all their exasperating inconsequentiality, are created by gifted writers is a fact that one registers without quite
