In form, digressions on the act of fiction

Description

Form must never be taken for granted, but must be created as the work itself is shaped: “The writer works not from a priori ideas about what will happen and what form it will take, but in and through the text.” Sukenick, one of our most original contemporary novelists, describes these essays as “the comments of a fiction writer about writing, not those of a critic on what has been written. They are more or less reports on experience—those of one engaged in the ongoing struggle with the angel of form, rather than of one studying its consequences from a cool distance: ‘in form,’ not ‘on form.’” The difficulty of creative works no longer accessible to traditional reading habits has threatened us with an age of criticism in which interpretation has be­come more imposing than invention. One of the tasks of modern fiction, therefore, is “to displace, energize, and re-embody its criticism—literally to re­unite at with our experience of the text.”