Ronald Sukenick – You Don’t Need to Understand

Introduction to the work of underground novelist Ronald Sukenick with an edited interview by Howard Slater, originally published in the first issue of Break/Flow in 1996.

Think faster feel more go from one thing to another take it all in at once

The Endless Short Story

A new beat a new rhythm is starting and nobody knows yet how they’re going to answer it nobody knows what kind of music it will make

98.6

Introduction by Howard Slater

Though little known in this country the American writer Ronald Sukenick is the author of numerous novels including: Out, 98.6, Long Talking Bad Condition Blues, Blown Away and more recently Doggy Bag. These are novels that play with form, notions of time and the very ‘idea’ of the novel just as their characters experiment with identity, place, power and relationships. He has also published a work called Down and In which deals with his life in the American literary underground through which he makes general points about oppositional culture.

He has developed these ideas in various articles in the American Book Review, including a recent one entitled The Underground Rears its Ugly Head, in which he argues a case for the meaninglessness of imposing distinctions between avant-garde and establishment, insider and outsider: the Avant-Pop theory. Sukenick’s other projects include Black Ice Books and the litzine Blackice. He has described these author controlled publishing activities as publishing the unpublishable, an attempt to try to create a new audience for another kind of fiction than the kind the mainstream publishers normally publish. Disruptive fictions that aim to expand the creative framework beyond the work itself.

These multiple activities and the genre-mixing that is part of his work makes it impermeable to classification in a stolid literary sense: it could be called ‘difficult’, experimental’, ‘avant-garde’. But this causes problems. If we take the Kerouac of Subterraneans or Visions of Cody similar ways of setting-apart the writing were levelled at Kerouac…but in the late 50s and early 60s if you were hip to the flow and velocity of the sax as Charlie Parker re-assembled the big-band standards then there was nothing experimental in Kerouac’s writing as such. It was what it Is.

The act of classifying occurs in those corners where there is a lack of intuitive understanding, where the feeling is deadened. It is worth bearing in mind that the tags “avant-garde” and “experimental” are often allocated to non-categorisable forms and whilst acknowledging that he works within a tradition Ron Sukenick has argued that literature is the canon of established ways of writing about received truth (1). This is another indication as to why his writing is gaining an audience among people not specifically trained in or setting great store in literature.

There is this sense of the writing being caught up in a network of relations exterior to the role of ‘author’, relations which a reader can ride. If you can’t catch up, catch on.

One of the great drags of self-consciously crafted ‘literature’ is its in-built claims as a corpus sufficient by its-self, its need to be ‘understood’ in pre-set ways. Ron Sukenick’s writing, because it doesn’t play by the rules, cannot be apprehended in this way.

There is no pre-ordained goal towards which the writing tends and in this way the reader accompanies the author on a journey of discovery, getting a feel of the flow but not necessarily having an already arrived at knowledge reinforced. A kind of suspension of belief. In this way interaction between the reader and writer (reader liberation) is a crucial facet of the writing: We have already mentioned an increased conceptual space that envelops the writing and this works in concert with actual spaces on the page…the omission of words that allows the reader to play a little with the possible relationship to the next word. Similarly the lack of punctuation increases concentration and allows the reader to forge meanings not directed by the author as does his use of punning and word bombs that not only crack open language but encourage the reader to make something of It.

Perhaps a facet vital to reader-liberation is the way that these techniques draw attention to the mechanisms of writing itself and by so doing Ron Sukenick pits the reality of the page against the fictionality of increases concentration and allows the reader to forge meanings not directed by the author as does his use of punning and word bombs that not only crack open language but encourage the reader to make something of it.

Perhaps a facet vital to reader-liberation is the way that these techniques draw attention to the mechanisms of writing itself and by so doing Ron Sukenick pits the reality of the page against the trying to be a person.

Within the novels there are very few points of stabilisation and in this way the writing makes you question what’s going on. You are engaged with the text and you can read it how you will. Open ended self doubt critical interrogation. Unlike conventional techniques of plot and character progression, with a Sukenick novel you are immediately immersed in the book to either ‘chart’ your own way through it or become lost and enjoy being lost and like the characters…you change all the time no-one knows where you’re at not even you. The idea of movement and change is pronounced. Anything is possible.

In Out there is ostensibly a central character, ‘Carl’, but Carl changes his name on so many occasions that it is almost impossible to keep track of what name the original ‘Carl’ is going under. This may have been made easier if Sukenick had ‘Carl’ displaying the same character traits…but no, Carl becomes Tommy the Tourist, becomes a killer, a conspirator. You have the option to seek out Carl and by doing impose a narrative logic on the writing or you can let the dissolution of identity, place and time wrap its haze around you.

To be aware that what is written is the possibility that something else could be written. You don’t need to understand…you need to interrupt yourself.

Becoming intense. Intensifying. The flow in a Suckenick novel is unstoppable. Pages without punctuation..no markers. The words scroll at such a pace precisely because they will not end in neat resolution. No tie up. The last page is the first page of the next novel. This speed is epitomised by Out, where the first chapter is numbered 10 and contains paragraphs of 10 lines, the next chapter is numbered 9 and contains 9-line paragraphs…right along until the blank chapter numbered 0. With this the wheels are set in motion for an acceleration but the roads are made freer by the way that the chapters aren’t thematically grouped but flow into each other.

Just because you turn the page and settle on ‘chapter 8’ it doesn’t mean you can insert your bookmark. What is a chapter? A phase? There are no motels in Out! Whilst you travel through the book the characters travel from the city to the sea from group activity to isolation, changing all the time. Connections develop meaning falls away.

It may be becoming clearer that there is a far from tenuous relationship between the writing of Ron Sukenick and music which goes further than just the rhythm and cadence we normally associate with writing. It can be seen in his improvisitory and playful approach to language; in the use of verbal-noise; in the ever changing momentum of sentences; in the way words communicate intensities; in the pause between the beats the clean slate the blank space; in the connections and resonances made possible; in the harnessing of technologies. There is also the sense that this writing, like music, is demonstrative of a know-how without a discourse (2), that there is a strong sense of intuitive practice around it that opens up a space for it to be received and used in turn by the reader.

The reader, like the listener, becomes a producer. In a similarly philosophical direction, the writing gets behind the experience of listening into what Ron Sukenick has described as the subtle ambiguities beyond normal perception that actually makes up most of our experience even though we can’t account for them (3). In many ways the fact that music can make us speechless should be embraced, it could be that we’re dealing with sub-conscious experiences, overflows that we don’t know how to ‘read’, overflows where language and sound are continually re-evaluated: the psycho-social project of other perceptions and other possibilities.

What follows are excerpts from an interview with Ron Sukenick held in May 1995. Rather than adopt the questions and answers format, Ron’s responses during the conversation are grouped under headings that I feel reflect just some of the themes that can be experienced from his writing.

Howard Slater

All non-annotated phrases In italics and in surrounding borders are sampled from both the books of Ronald Sukenick and the interview. Otherwise:

(1) Ronald Sukenick: Introduction to 98.6, Fiction Collective, 1975/94).

(2) Michael de Certeau: Practice Of Everyday Life (University of California, 1988).

(3) Ronald Sukenick: Doggy Bag (Black Ice Books, 1994).

Interview with Ronald Sukenick

Language and Experience

Let me start by saying that I don’t write experimental novels. My position is that the kind of writing I do highlights the processes of language and an interplay of language with experience, rather than a concept of language as a transparent window through which you view so-called ‘reality’. So right away, in my view, you have a sense of inter-play and play because there’s that recognition that the language with which you talk about experience (and I avoid using the word – ‘reality’) is inevitably going to effect the experience no matter how you work it.

Even if it is an attempt to recount something you remember, memory itself distorts, and then when you bring it up in language it distorts even further. Actually one shouldn’t say “distortion” because it’s what we know after all, and that kind of language is always in process, always improvisatory, always contingent and always aware of itself as a medium. Now, in the so-called realistic novel, all that is cut away.

There’s a pretence that you’re not manipulating the audience, that you’re not trying to persuade the audience. The pretence is that “that’s the way it is” and you know if somebody forces you to think about it, you know that’s not the way it is. This is precisely why you get the Wordsworthian formula of “suspension of disbelief’ which is key, because in order to swallow that kind of writing you have to suspend disbelief. In my kind of writing, what | like to do is make the reader aware of the stage props and the mechanisms that create the illusion.

Identity and Power

Generally speaking in all my work the characters are not “well-rounded”, they’re intentionally flat and intentionally very mutable. They’re not stable identities. The reason for this is very simple and it’s that I don’t believe in the novelistic idea of characterisation. This Victorian sense of identity was important in a colonialist empire because the exertion of authority and a will was so important. Not only in colonialism but also in that era of capitalism. The businessman had to be strong and self-willed and have a real hard identity whose peak is the Victorian colonialist culture but it is certainly manifest in the bourgeois sense of identity.

However, this sense has, | think, been sliding and diffusing and people have become less defined by some presumed interior volition or even “god-given” sense of identity. This is not only disappearing but in many cases now it’s a liability because it’s not the kind of identity you can function with very easily in what I call the electrosphere, the new electronic culture. And for many people who try to maintain that kind of sense of identity they’re very disturbed or don’t understand what I’m doing when | use characterisation like this in my writing.

Another thing about identity is that it’s a necessary package for capitalist culture. It’s very hard for a chameleonic, morphing kind of identity to be packaged because it’s always different. So, a Hollywood actor needs an Image and that’s it. It’s getting truer and truer of writers also, they need an image. The focus is in vending books these days, it’s moving away from the text to the author and the image of the author.

Part of this is related to copyright. I mean copyrights are the things that make intellectual properties the property of someone and that someone is an identity…it can be an individual author…a corporation (in the states a corporation is considered to be like a person, with the rights of a person). I think it’s possible that copyright should be done away with and that intellectual property should no longer be property and in many important senses it isn’t and cannot be property…it’s shared. So suppose for example that books were released through the interNET rather than through the publishers. To be read on the screen or downloaded so they would become general property, if property at all, and that might be very healthy.

Reader Liberation

The current forms of fiction and other forms of discourse are dominating and authoritarian and the authority of the text needs to be challenged I think. First of all it’s challenged de-facto by electronics, by the computer because the computer is inter-active and so you don’t have the authoritative text which you can’t change.

You can change it and the writer himself can change it and the person who has it on the screen can change it and so on. So there’s that, but also, | think that it’s unhealthy for that kind of downward line of authority. What we need is some kind of bottom-up interchange between producers and consumers. What I’m trying to do is smash the language that makes this kind of manipulation possible and open it up, expose it and then go on to use it but in a different way. I’m trying to disrupt the way that these forms are used to manipulate us.

My belief is that you need to show people what the options are and when they see what the options are they’ll see there are better options than the ones they are used to. | don’t believe in imposing any particular option but | do believe that people are largely self-organising and that’s a very powerful kind of movement. But they can’t self-organise when the information flow is blocked or they can self-organise but only in very limited ways. So my “programme” (it’s not really a programme!) is simply to open things out and show that there are many facets, many sides, many options.

I don’t conceive myself as somebody who is imposing a view of reality necessarily, at least If I do it’s not something that’s very important to me and I try to minimise it. I think of myself more in connection with the so-called primitive tribal figure of the shaman (or in industrial cultures what’s known as the medium) where I become a conduit for a whole bunch of things, a conduit sometimes in a very precise way where I use collage and just pick things from the artefacts of the culture and a conduit also in more subtle ways…

Like relaxing my mental muscles and seeing what comes in…trying to allow the culture to speak through me rather than imposing my ego on the culture.  You have to stop your ego level from operating in your rational level to a certain extent and let other levels of the psyche in. The way I’d sum it up is that I believe a writer shouldn’t know what he’s talking about.

Music

I was listening to Louis Armstrong by accident the other day and heard the phrase “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”. I think that’s true of writing. The manifest meaning is completely cardboard and clunky and unimportant in the long runi f there’s not some interior momentum or rhythm) which also communicates. It communicates more importantly and more deeply than the message…though I don’t put it that way, I don’t divide the medium and the message. That’s why I always say that the kind of writing that uses the standard forms doesn’t get at the deeper levels of the way you can effect an audience. So yes, music is a good model for that…it keeps you aware that there are other aspects to language than the creation of rational meaning.

One of the things that happens as music evolves is that noise becomes more important, just like nonsense has become more important, at least to me, in fiction. Nonsense is simply the noise of writing. The politics of bringing into consciousness what is not conscious and examining it….What is the nature of noise and how does meaning emerge from it? Those are issues which are very important and which the authorities don’t want to investigate because, not only do they have no motive to, but its also against their interests. If you are in authority you don’t want to do things that are going to look into what you do too deeply…it’s liable to upset that authority.

Another important thing is to be aware of the graphic side of language, because language in its authoritative form is written language, print on paper, and you have to be aware that there are other ways of making marks on paper than that particular kind of organisation which is very imposing and one-way. It doesn’t leave any room for the readers imagination. The kind of writing I do leaves a lot of space for the reader to interact with the rubrics I set up without trying to impose my particular meaning.

Doggy Bag

There’s a lot of nonsense in Doggy Bag and there’s places where the nonsense passes into pure graphic notation…No matter how nonsensical you try to get the brain immediately tries to make some kind of sense out of it. It’s very hard to be really nonsensical. I see things as a continuum so I can move out of nonsense and with that background make statements which I think are valid, at least for the moment.

Statements that are large philosophical statements. But I think you can only do that when you are cognisant that they emerge out of nonsense and will return to nonsense. I think there’s a lot of life that lies outside language and among the types of realism that { promote Is the way people really think and I consider my type of writing not as a kind of fiction but as a kind of thinking that’s been pushed aside by the culture for the sake of empirical-rationalist thinking. So in the form of my fiction I intend to partake of the way people think when they’re not being formally logical or philosophical and that form is contradictory and rambling and it’s full on non-sequiters, it’s not straight-lined and a lot of the stories in Doggy Bag purposefully take that kind of rambling, a-logical, non-syllogistic, non-plot like forms.

And of course digression is certainly key here. | also try to capture the random way things happen ih the world which is not at all plotted and if it makes any sense it’s only in retrospect. | try to capture this totally random, coincidental way that things seem to occur as you’re going through experience which is not at all the way realistic novels work.

Underground

| think opposition can come from all levels of the culture. In the States, at least, the underground has become above ground and at certain points it’s engaged in an open battle for the culture. However, the crucial question is how does somebody who’s succeeded in terms of money and fame, as well as quality of work, relate back to the culture that produced him or her. I think it’s very important for all concerned to realise that there does not have to be a break with the culture you came out of. There can be a continuum, a back-and-forth kind of motion.

Like I publish with the commercial publishers also, but I move back and forth and I don’t give up my connections with the underground culture. One thing we learned from the 60s is that the rebels were very media orientated…they learned how to manipulate the media. But you can only do it so far, because the media is much bigger than you are and much more powerful so at a certain point, when it suits their purposes the manipulation starts coming back the other way. That’s the thing you have to be aware of. You can only use the media at certain points, crucial points, otherwise you yourself become mediatised.

You have to have your own version of the media to fall back on.

• Wikipedia article on Ronald Sukenick
• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1

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