In Rome Easter Saturday, we'd had to move our rental car off the Via Sistina because the college kids, Commies and pacifists were staging a march against the war. Lots of anti-American and anti-NATO sloganeering, some new Yankee-go-home graffiti. I can't say I disagreed with them. From our Tecognano house we had to drive through a hamlet called Ossaia to get anywhere. It's supposedly named for the piles of bones (ossa=bone) of the Roman legionnaires killed when Hannibal lured them into the swamps north of Trasimeno, Europe is lousy with that-reminders of war, and wars and wars and wars. Things have a particular historical density we just don't get here. It's hard to imagine Europeans, left to their own devices, fighting this kind of war by videocam. Video war is and American invention-though, like the rest of our entertainment industry, it certainly has developed its audience elsewhere.
I brought one book a long for the trip, and it turned out to be fitting: Ronald Sukenick's Mosaic Man (FC2, 261 pages, $14.95). Sukenick's a seminal figure from the postmodern literature of the 60's, the "anti-fiction," "antinovel" movement. Fed up with made-up stories and distrustful of the mechanics of classical fiction, writers like Sukenick and his friend Raymond Federman began experimenting with injecting a lot of "factual" materials into their work, using diaristic and documentary elements, having themselves and their friends as "characters" in their often plotless, fractal tales (both Sukenick and Federman are in Mosaic Man). It's not as aggressively nonlinear as the pomosities of a Coover; more, I don't know, rumpled. Sukenick neatly sums up the esthetic, or at least the impulse, in a few lines of Mosaic Man:
It's not until Ron starts writing his first novel, Up, that he realizes he doesn't want to be a novelist. Its then that he realizes he finds the whole idea of what's called a novel boring. He realizes that he simply doesn't like the idea of making things up. It's a children's game. If he wants to make things up, he can go to work in Hollywood, preferably for Walt Disney.... Of course it has to be said that every time Ron looks over his shoulder at a book he's written, he finds it turned into a novel. Behind his back.
In fact, the fictional elements in Sukenick's books can be highly inventive and playful. He jams the words and wordplay, puns and parables, dream imagery and literary allusions and-very important for Sukenick-illusions. The enjambment of the fictional and the factual gives his best work a rough, ballsy vigor you don't get from the usual well-made, well-behaved Contemporary American Novel. That unruly vitality may be why, very unusually for an "experimental" writer these days, all of his titles-Up, Blown Away, Degenerative Prose, 98.6, The Endless Short Story, Doggy Bag and more remain in print today.
The title Mosaic Man is a pun with multiple references. The book's mosaic of fragmentary elements: autobiography, travelogue, dreams, transcribed tapes, pure fantasy, extended parodies, one-liners. Then there's Ronald Sukenick himself as presented here, a mosaic of personalities, experiences, memories, affects, indecisions. And he's Mosaic as in Jewish, a follower of Moses and Mosaic Law. This last sense is the book's central conceit: this is very much-by the end, I felt, too much-a book about being a Jew in the world today. A wondering Jew. That's one of the ways the book turned out to be fitting for my trip: Sukenick strikes numerous chords here about the holocaustal victim and refugee, the wanderer and vagabond and pariah and unwanted guest offered conditional asylum, not even comfortably at home in the homeland. All considerations easily transferred to the current news from the Balkans.
The book's obviously and unapologetically a quilt of smaller pieces, varying in tone and voice, several of which appeared previously in various literary journals. In big chunks they span the authors life-growing up in Brooklyn during World War II, his beatnik student years in Paris, recurring trips to Venice, a trip to Israel, the view out his 36th floor apartment in Battery Park City today. One of my favorites is the boyhood-in-Brooklyn section, told as a fever dream young Ron had one time when he was sick. It's part Catskills shtick, part comic book, part Oz. In the dream, Ron is a secret agent who knows "Jew Jitsu," heading to Europe in a Flying Wing piloted by Captain Midnight; also on board are a girl he likes, named Happy Landis, and various of his crazy Jewish uncles. On the plane's radio he hears messages like:
"I want you to remember as you begin this momentous secret mission that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. This is our finest hour in a day that will live in infamy. The hand that held the dagger has plunged it into the back of its neighbor. We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the farms. If necessary we will wait till next year. I have called Branch Rickey and told him that Leo Durocher is not a nice guy...."
When Happy Landis goes to make lunch-herring, of course-the herring starts arguing the Talmud with her:
"Ugh! You're disgusting," said Happy Landis. "And you smell bad and you're stingy and clannish and pushy."
"You don't like herring?" asked the herring.
"It's not that I don't like herring, I don't like pushy herring."
"You don't like pushy herring try Coney Island Whitefish. You know what's Coney Island Whitefish?"
Yeah, its slang for used condoms.
The long, also dreamlike segment on Israel is, among other things, a tour de force of travel writing. Sukenick adroitly evokes the floating ill-ease, the hallucinatory dislocation that travel in a very different culture from one's own can provoke. There's also some astute political observation. At one point he's careening around Israeli roads in a kind of circus clown-car stuffed with Jews of several persuasion and nationalities, all in the homeland for their own disparate reasons, all looking for something. A "supervoluptous" sabra is driving:
"Israeli! she scoffs at the radio. "The Sephardim look at Menachim Begin and see, my god, King Solomon. And the American Jews who come here with all sorts of ideas in their heads. They don't see that this is a poor country living beyond its means, broken into endless factions, quibbling over stupid superstitions to the point of death, with an impossible political situation in a completely hostile region. No! They see the land of milk and honey. Right. Goats and bees. They see Eretz Israel, they see the fatherland-the fatherland! Father of what land? Of Lativa and Yemen? Of Kracow and Morocco? of Algiers and Auschwitz?" "Please, watch the road, says the Yekke [German Jew]. She grabs the wheel as the car veers. "Jews are not supposed to be stupid, but here Jews are becoming stupider everyday. And do you know why? American money. Every stupid mistake here is underwritten by American money. American money makes us look smart but it's buying a dream world based on stupidity. With every dollar America gives Israel, Israel grows a dollar more stupid. We don't even have to think anymore, all we have to do is buy. The American disease..."
Israel, Sukenick says, is a kind of temporal wormhole in which time collapses and telescopes; "in Israel everything is happening at the same time... because in Israel the past is the present. Recall is total, time id forgotten. That's why every new war is also an old war, every criminal act and act of revenge, every wacko cruelty a righteous vindication. Each day careens through a time machine where history is a geography of trauma." Reading this in Italy, with CNN on in the background, I simply substituted the Balkans for Israel.
Along with the greater ruminations on what-is-a Jew, Sukenick salts the book with smaller, sometimes almost aphoristic thoughts like: "Personally, being Jewish is just an advanced case of being human, and being human may be a terminal disease that's run its course. Personally, maybe we're just beings, forget human, beings among other beings, some hairy, some furry, some feathery, some leathery, and some who possibly will soon arrive from other sectors of the universe." Later, he balefully notes, "There is no human race. Let's start next century with a clean state. The only race left in this century is the one for the nearest exit."
Mosaic Man begins with "In the beginning was the WORD," not just a biblical reference but an envoi, a directive, an obligation to Sukenick as a writer and to all writers, for whom, after all, everything does begin with the word. Later he observes:
What we yearn for Ron obscurely believes is a book that is true beyond illusion and this book could only be a fundamental book that does not pretend to be something it literally is not (doven). This book would be the book that is wholly book (doven). This would be a book that Ron believes in wholly (doven). This would be and is the wholly book of books. Amen.
Reader who think some Jews obsess too much about what-it-means-to-be-a- Jew may lose patience and interest by the long final section, in which Sukenick pursues the mystery of his identity through multiple layers of schtick, including a not altogether fortuitous parody of The Maltese Falcon. Enough already. But then, I often lose patience with what-it-means-to-be-a-Christian, and female, and black, and handicapped, and whatever and whatever books, too. All writers are monomaniacal narcissists, and I wouldn't take anyone's identity from them, but after a certain while of watching over an author's shoulder as they gaze into the mirror of their soul I'm getting antsy. You're a one-legged lesbian Latina Jew who's come to terms with your MS, okay, good for you, congratulations, now can we move on to something of interest to me?
An obvious potential drawback of Sukenick's having abandoned traditional storytelling mechanics is that his books are in danger of devolving into the lassitude of pure pastiche. Much as Sukenick yearns for that "wholly book" his work tends to be open-ended and aggregate rather than what one would call neat and complete, and Mosaic Man is a ramble that drops you off not all that far from where you began. It's as though he despairs of ever creating that wholly book that he takes perverse pride in writing these unwholly ones.
But I like that he prefers honest incompleteness to the pretense of his Well-Tempered Modern Novel. Most of the my favorites among the Great Works of Western Literature are discursive and patchwork-essentially, and often intentionally, plotless: The Illiad, The Odyssey, The Golden Ass, The Divine Comedy, The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Le Morte D'Arthur, Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, certainly everything I like best from the 20th century. The Well-Made Novel is, outside of certain mechanical genres like the crime novel and sci-fi and romance, basically a 19th century preoccupation anyway. Should have died by the end of the 1920's and only survives today because the Updikian establishment keeps it on full life support.
To that list of the great and unwholly Sukenick would add the Old Testament: quite intentionally, if you believe him, and the mystics and kabbalists, a nonstory, a puzzle, a mystery, the biggest conundrum of them all, the Lord's own acrostic the contemplation of which, the wrestling with which, may lead at least to gnosis, if not from there to salvation. Amen.