PETER NICHOLLS

Introduction

In May 1995, the University of Sussex and Do Tongues of Brighton played host to a remarkable gathering of novelists from the United States, Canada and Britain. For two days a large audience listened to papers and readings by writers whose work represents the contemporary literary scene at its most lively and diverse: Kathy Acker, Neil Bartlett, Catherine Bush, Alison Fell, Bonnie Greer, Gary Indiana, A. L. Kennedy, Walter Mosley, Jayne Anne Phillips, Iain Sinclair, Ron Sukenick, and Lynne Tillman. In four panels, the participants addressed a series of major topics: fictional constructions of the past, representations of the body, the relation of writing to popular culture, and conceptions of narrativity. Familiar topics of academic debate, certainly, but ones which acquired a new edge and urgency when considered from the vantage point of the writer’s craft. It’s that particular angle of entry which characterises the papers presented in this special issue of CQ. Here we find writers looking at a range of technical and theoretical problems through the lens of their own work, weighing matters of style and readership in ways that frequently transform our understanding of their fiction and of the debates in question. Alongside these papers we also publish a series of sections from works in progress which give an intriguing glimpse of contributors’ current projects.

The different perspectives available in this work may remind us of the unsatisfactoriness of critical labels such as ’blank fiction’ or even the blander, more generic ’postmodernism’. Certainly, there are enough dis- agreements between contributors here - some tacit, others more directly voiced - to caution an editor against any tendentious plotting of con- tinuities between them. On the other hand, there is a sense in which these writers could be said to share a commitment to fiction as both an explora- tory and a political medium. In very different ways they all use fiction not only as a means of raising questions about sexuality, identity, history, and so on, but also as a way of moving beyond the dogmatic investments of conventional politicaI polemic. Much of the interest these writers share in forms of fantasy, in the curious workings of memory, in alternative languages and cultures, reflects a desire to release fiction from the banal certainties celebrated in much so-called ’mainstream’ writing.

This may help to explain the preoccupation with time and history which many of these writers share. A fascination with the interweaving of past and present - both desired and ineluctable - is something which surely

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places most, if not all, of our contributors outside the frame of the post- modern as that is usually considered. Think, for example, of Fredric Jame- son’s hugely influential account of postmodernism as a failure of historical memory and as a turn instead toward the past as a mere repository of ungrounded styles, Initially convincing, the argument starts to lose its purchase when we remark that much of the finest writing of the last decade or so has been vitally concerned with the pressures of a history which precisely can’t be forgotten. It’s in this sense that we should read Iain Sinclair’s warning here about the ’tyranny of “now”’ which afflicts contemporary culture, while Jayne Anne Phillips also speaks for many of the contributors when she observes that ’Literature insists on history’.

Much of the writing collected here explores the multiple forms of that insistence: across a broad spectrum of styles and tones we move between A. L. Kennedy’s discovery of Cyrano de Bergerac in twentieth-century Scotland, Walter Mosley’s recreation of forties Los Angeles, Bonnie Greer’s account of the blues, Iain Sinclair’s London . . . the list could go on. This is fiction which finds in fantasy and the unpredictable movements of memory essential forms of displacement: the past moments to which we return are not only strange and disturbing, but they also unsettle the safe limits of a history-less present. Such writing carries us toward the every- day world in precisely the same movement that it disabuses us of its familiarity, of its secure and knowable concreteness. While the writers presented here clearly negotiate the legacy of realism in very different ways, none of them, I think, is willing to allow the reader the comfortable pleasures of easy recognition.

It’s in that refusal that we can begin to discern a politics of form, a politics intimately bound up with the mechanisms of writing itself. Hence the concern with narrative in many of the pieces collected here - with, as Lynne Tillman puts it, stories as ‘a way to think’ or with, in Ron Sukenick’s somewhat different formulation, narrative thinking as ’arguably more powerful and more pervasive than logical thought’. For in interrogating that obviousness which traditionally attaches to narrative, contemporary writing might draw attention to what Gary Indiana calls ’the delusions of specialness and safety that middle-class readers are raised to cherish about themselves’. To demolish those delusions is, he argues, also to demolish ’the social and political certainties that go with them‘. It is the shifting and unresolved nature of this interface between literary form and the im- mediacy of actual political events that many of these writers explore. The histories and stylisations of the body, for example, are discussed by Neil Bartlett, Kathy Acker and Alison Fell, while Walter Mosley, Catherine

PETER NICHOLLS Introduction 3

Bush and Bonnie Greer variously consider the marginalisations of race and nation.

There is much that is playful, comic, fantastic even, in the work pre- sented here, but there is also a seriousness and sense of political urgency which distinguish this writing from most ‘mainstream‘ fiction. While we may not find these writers giving answers in common, we might detect a shared sense of the questions to be asked - questions which begin from the assumption that in the very ’untruth’ of fiction lies its capacity to free us from the oppressive limits of a commonsense world. To think about fiction in this way is to assert not only its importance but also its absolute necessity.

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The 90s Fictions event was sponsored by Critical Quarterly, Serpent’s Tail and the University of Sussex (School of English and American Studies and Graduate Research Centre in Humanities).