ABSTRACT
American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s was not only exciting and abundant; it has seemed, to most of those who watch it, to undergo some fundamental transformation of style and value, built on a deep cultural change. There have been plentiful arguments about where this cultural change came from – from the reconstruction of the novel itself, or from something deeper, more popular and based in daily American life. Ronald Sukenick’s ideas square with avant-garde thinking, and his thoughts about the fictionality of all discourse fit the theories of language dominant in our own century from Saussure down to Derrida and Kristeva. Once theme becomes structure, fictional meaning finds its place in its performance – in the process of writing rather than in the static finished product. Process is kept alive, in the abstract-expressionist manner, by the reader’s part in the novel’s act of being.
