Resolved: Narcissism is the mother of invention. To evaluate that claim, let us first define our terms. Narcissism, the good people at Random House report, is an "inordinate fascination with oneself." The word also can refer to "an erotic gratification derived from admiration of one's own physical or mental attributes."
Now let's turn our attention to Mosaic Man, the latest "avant-pop" novel from Ronald Sukenick, which addresses the writer is "his own master, the masturbator of his fate." If he is, then invention- that is, fiction-would be the seed spilled by his self-serving urge. Sukenick, a liberated thinker, refutes the notion of mastery: "His destiny is not his own. He's not himself today, nor any day. Why? Because he's a Jew, in a word. And a word can change everything, whether you want it to or not. Not up to you. Or me. I'm not in control. No. I am who I am. Like Pop Eye the Sailorman."
Thus spake the Sailorman. But it is anyone prepared to dispute that this spurt of logorrhea comes from a chronic literary onanist? In a moment of greater lucidity, Sukenick says that he has "at times been fascinated with writing and rewriting my autobiography, there's so much of it I don't know anything about."
These two quotes-one freewheeling and rather nonsensical, the other self-reflective and rather profound-represent the two poles of Sukenick's latest creation. In 1987, the author published Down and In, a cogent memoir about his artistic tribe- the iconoclastic writers, painters and musicians who lived on New York's Lower East Side in the 1960' and ‘70's. By contrast, Mosaic Man is a cryptic search for individual identity, as an artist and a Jew, across a half-dozen countries and as many decades. As the title of the book suggests, Sukenick doesn't find what he's looking for in one piece. He starts at the beginning. Make that the very beginning- Genesis. Sukenick's conceit-and that's the only word for it- is to organize "Ron"'s self-mythology after the Old Testament. Here the five books of Moses go under the titles "Genes, "Ex/Ode , " for instance, represents a series of incomplete tape transcriptions taken from Sukenick's aged mother. The only exodus here seems to be her move to another unit in the same apartment building. This event does, however, play some role in the suicide of Sukenick's ailing father. Later the author will suggest that the Israelites are a fatherless tribe led by a "defeated bur defiant matriarchy."
In the process of killing the father, Sukenick seems to have driven God out of His own book. "Ronnie" is closest to his religion in "Umbilicus." when he's studying for bar mitzvah. Though he's in it for the wristwatch, the savings bonds, and the fountain pen, Ronnie has a close brush with belief in the person of Mr. Marter, his Hebrew instructor. This meek refugee succeeds in introducing his charge to the mental rigors of exegesis. In a way, he succeeds too well. Sukenick's concept of Judaism is not that of faith or a moral code, but a kind of hermeneutics- a set of intellectual rules for knowing the world.
First he must know himself- in the carnal sense, at least. This he does in a long, feverish fantasy sequence that takes Ronnie on a bombing run over the German death camps. He's joined by Captain Midnight, a character from a radio drama; Sgt. Leibowitz, a neighbor killed in the war; and Happy Landis, the first in a series of women who will serve as repositories for his ejaculations about sex.
The flight deposits him in postwar Europe, where Ron has come to study Wallace Stevens on a postgraduate fellowship at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Europe, however, hasn't quite graduated to an understanding of the fellowship of man, and in Paris, Ron encounters the infectious strains of neofacism. He does this as a member of atelier, which is "something like a fraternity," and "seems to consist largely of right- wingers and anti-Semites." One celebratory eve they slather themselves in blue body paint and run like thugs through the city cadging free drinks. Then they go back to a rented hall and gang rape their women.
This incident turns out to be a parable about the corrupting allure of power. The French neofacist LePen, Sukenick says, was a friend of the ateliers, and his current political violence is an extension of that libertinism. Ron is originally "revolt[ed]" at this discovery. He also "has a huge erection." Although we quickly grasp Sukenick's lesson- "his own nature [is] split between thinky and kinky"- he seems to learn best through rote. And so we must join him as he contracts a case of "the virus" by reading Celine. What follows is a rough deflowering, a nasty intestinal problem, and another cluster fuck-this time the woman, a young American, has $500 shoved up her ass in recompense. (Decades later in the book, she turns up to say the whole messy incident helped put her in touch with her bourgeois roots).
Whether all this bad sex is necessary to the narrative is an open question. What cannot be disputed is that for an unconventional writer, Sukenick seems to rely on the same exhausted sexual cliche as much of the rest of his generation. Like such mainstream contemporaries as Updike, Mailer, and Roth, Sukenick discovers himself through the humiliation of women. Is this offensive or just boring?
Sukenick needless to say, does not see himself- make that Ron- as a member of any common movement. To prove it, he condemns a successful peer named Art, whose fiction "taps[s] a profound Jewish craving for a shallow materialism leading to recognition and acceptance." Ron, too, is writing a book and it's called Up (which is also the title of Sukenick's first novel). This noble efforts will brook no compromises. The problem with most novels, Sukenick argues, is that people always waste time making things up. This is wrong. Not just wrong, in fact, but sacrilegious. For what is narrative fabrication but a "graven image," an idol? This is the Second Commandment we're talking about, and Sukenick believes we ignore it at our peril.
The next step in Sukenick's reasoning is either ingenious or preposterous- possibly both. By inventing stories and creating graven images, Sukenick postulates, other writers participate in the worship of the Golden Calf, the idol that Moses' brother Aaron originally crafted. Today, the Golden Calf stands for the mammon of money worship and artistic celebrity. Sukenick's point? That by conducting his lifelong examination of difficult, digressive narrative, he has rejected the satanic rules of literary success. All those writers who try to generate illusion and suspend disbelief? Money grubbers and pagans. (In an interview a few years ago, the author blamed this tradition on the "limies.")
Sukenick soon pushes his theory to the point of comedy, setting a cast of shadowy characters loose in Jerusalem where they search for the original idol- the Golden Calf. In recent years, this holy city has become a funhouse for fiction about fractured identities: Consider Philip Roth's Operation Shylock, and Robert Stone's Damascus Gate. Sukenick is no visitor to the funhouse; he's practically one of the carnies. And so he commits the literary equivalent of throwing a brick at a mirror and then trying to sketch his reflection. The last fifty page of the novel see Sukenick grind these shards down to a hallucinatory powder and snort. In the mayhem that follows, dozens of indistinct characters spring loose on a madcap treasure hunt for the Golden Calf. Like many drug trips- and William S. Burroughs novels- this invention lurches on in a merry rush a long after the thrill is gone.
That said, it would be a mistake to dismiss the author's Golden Calf theory as so much frivolity. During a visit to a conference in Berlin, Sukenick (now writing in the first person) speaks directly- and plangently- about his career: "I know what [writer Raymond] Fetterman thinks about me and I'm sure he's correct, that I don't promote myself, that I don't know how to sell myself, that I'm commercially backward, that I'll never get anywhere the way I proceed, and consequently he's always trying to help me in my pursuit of the Golden Calf." In other words, following a Jewish way of thinking and writing- forsaking the Golden Calf on naturalistic fiction- has made Ronald Sukenick a literary castaway.
Like it or not, Mosaic Man is a bravura act of psychological legerdemain. And as such, it suggests a corollary to our opening hypothesis. Resolved: Self-justification is the father of invention.