Prologue to Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction

This is the introduction, as it were, to a short book I will shortly make available entitled Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. As explained in the prologue, the book is an attempt both to introduce Sorrentino’s work to readers less familiar with it and to re-introduce a body of experimental fiction to those who might have forgotten how consistently committed to the continuous renewal of literary art it was.

This book is not a biographical study of Gilbert Sorrentino’s life and work. Although it became more evident to me while trying to write about Sorrentino’s whole career as both a poet and a writer of fiction that understanding a writer’s intentions can be relevant to a well-grounded interpretation of a literary work (as long as they are not regarded as the final authority), and that the writers’ attested experiences can be useful to the critic if they are used to judge how experience has been aesthetically transformed, I have no background as a biographer, and it is Sorrentino’s work that needs renewed attention, not his life circumstances. Still, the dearth of biographical information about Sorrentino beyond the most cursory is a significant hurdle for a critic to clear, and a proper biography to mitigate error and certify facts would certainly be welcome.

But neither is this book an exercise in academic criticism—certainly not as currently practiced in what’s left of literary study in the academy, and not really even as it existed prior to the advent of theory and its subsequent metamorphosis into various versions of cultural studies. My focus is on explication of text, but my readings of Sorrentino’s works are close readings only in the sense that they give unqualified attention to the formal and stylistic qualities of those works. They don’t necessarily provide exhaustive analysis that attempts to take the measure of a literary work’s aesthetic dynamics in the way some New Critics set out to do. There is attention to context, related both to Sorrentino’s work as a whole and to literary practices in general, as well as some citations to external sources when such sources can lead to a further appreciation of the text at hand.

Readers will probably notice, however, that “context” of the kind academic criticism presently emphasizes the most is largely missing here. I do not dwell on the historical, sociological, and political implications of Sorrentino’s fiction, nor do I attempt to subordinate that fiction to its utility as historical analysis or cultural diagnosis. Readers expecting that sort of emphasis will surely be disappointed with my approach, and this examination of Gilbert Sorrrentino’s writing is probably not going to be their sort of thing. What is most “old-fashioned” about my approach is probably its underlying assumption that “literary criticism” names a mode of critical writing that seeks to account for the literary effects of literature, which it does not view as secondary to the critic’s real concerns beyond it. Literary criticism exists to help us understand how a literary work achieves its own integrity, not to direct our attention elsewhere, to something else the critic finds more important (these day, that would usually be politics). We should read Gilbert Sorrentino’s books because they offer us a distinctively rewarding reading experience that expands our appreciation of the possibilities of literary form, not because they instruct us about history or might lead to our moral and political improvement.

While the tone of this study is prevailingly analytical, the analysis is “technical” only if you believe that any attempt to disturb the surface purity of the literary text with any critical concepts (perhaps including the characterization of what we are reading as “text”) is an undesirable imposition on the pristine act of reading. The terminology I use should be immediately familiar to anyone who takes literature seriously to begin with (or at least its denotation clear from the context of its use) and is always employed to explicate and clarify Sorrentino’s strategies. Since Sorrentino is a writer who habitually invokes unconventional strategies, any critical effort to comprehensively cover all of Sorrentino’s published work will necessarily venture interpretations requiring extended explication. And that is indeed what is offered here: sustained exposition of a body of work that systematically defies established precepts about the nature of prose fiction accepted in mainstream literary culture. If the reader finishes this short book believing that Sorrentino’s project as a writer has been coherently elucidated and that the aesthetic achievement of individual works of his has been cogently described, I would consider my effort a success.

If the scope of that effort does not encompass the biographical particulars of Sorrentino’s career as a writer, a thorough reckoning with what he wrote (and to a more limited extent what he said about what he wrote at various times) certainly does leave a vivid enough impression of a writer with very strong opinions and an unequivocal commitment to his understanding of the demands of art. Absent more widely available biographical information about Sorrentino’s personal and professional life outside the writing of his books, only idle speculation would have that these somewhat cantankerous traits carried over to his interactions with people, although based on stray reports from scattered sources it seems likely that he was willing to accept the consequences of being faithful to his vision (losing friends over his portrayal of them, for example). He was certainly willing to bear the consequences of his intransigence in adhering to the principles of aesthetic experimentation that motivated his work as a fiction writer and that resulted in a kind of hand-to-mouth existence in the publishing world, often circulating his manuscripts among numerous publishers before finally securing one willing to take a chance on his latest offbeat offering.

For those of us who think that the urge to trace the features of a writer’s work to their source in the writer’s life us too often indulged in strained interpretations and ought to be resisted, perhaps we know enough about Gilbert Sorrentino to judge the work efficaciously: born to an Italian father and Irish mother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (where he befriended fellow writer Hubert Selby, Jr.) a stint in the Army while attending Brooklyn College, where he returned after his discharge and founded the literary magazine, Neon, although did not finish his college degree. After beginning to publish his own poetry, he became associated with the journal, Kulchur, which focused on literary criticism and in which Sorrentino published many of his own critical reviews and essays (later collected in Something Said (1984). At this time he also began writing his first novel, The Sky Changes (1966). (He wrote an earlier, more conventional novel—described by Sorrentino as “very, very long”—that was never published, presumably consigned to oblivion.) After The Sky Changes was published, Sorrentino wrote his second novel, Steelwork.

In the second half of the 1960s, Sorrentino worked as an editor at Grove Press, which he left in 1970 after completing Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (published in 1971). (Among the books he worked on as editor were Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, as well as The Autobiography of Malcolm X.) During the 1970s he seems to have subsisted mainly on fellowships and occasional teaching jobs. (Unfortunately, his early novels didn’t sell so well). In 1979, the publication of Mulligan Stew seemed to finally promise a degree of commercial success, but, unfortunately, while this novel did establish Sorrentino’s reputation as an important experimental writer (and remains his best-known and best-selling book), that promise wouldn’t be fulfilled, as Sorrentino couldn’t really adapt his talent to the kind of conventional thinking that writing a “successful” novel would entail. Thus, the most consequential development affecting the course of his subsequent career was the offer to join the creative writing faculty at Stanford University in 1982, an appointment that ended only with Sorrentino’s retirement in 1999. This job may have restricted his ability to pursue writing full-time, but it also allowed him to write the sort of fiction he wanted to write without concern for publishers’ disapproval or financial uncertainty.

This condensed biography shows that Sorrentino was more or less able to live an outwardly literary life, despite being from a working-class neighborhood in Depression-era Brooklyn. But the “literary” assumptions accompanying Sorrentino’s career were always heterodox and antipathetic to the prevailing consensus about acceptable literary practice; in his reviews he was often openly hostile toward the writers who he believed profited from this consensus. Perhaps what we can most readily take from surveying Sorrentino’s life as a writer is that his primary commitment was to the integrity of literature itself—to its reclamation as a vibrant art that doesn’t just repeat the inherited formulas and lifeless gestures that dominated a literary culture characterized more by the pretense to seriousness than to its actual pursuit.

A superficial reading of Sorrentino’s work might suggest that he is essentially an iconoclast, a writer who overturns existing literary forms simply for the sake of doing so. Although there is truth to the claim that Sorrentino’s fiction is iconoclastic, his approach is not to flagrantly ignore the demands of form, or to reject outright the influence of literary history. Sorrentino wishes to replace traditional narrative structure as the default formal principle of fiction with new forms invented or adapted for the work at hand. In this way, he actually pays more attention to form than most novelists, either conventional or “transgressive.” Similarly, Sorrentino does not dismiss the literary past, although the writers he invokes may not always be the most obviously canonized. That Sorrentino takes preceding literary achievements seriously is made explicit in his criticism, but it is equally clear in much of his fiction that his writing originates in a far-ranging familiarity with the forms and tropes supplied by literature itself and by particular writers he admired (even if Sorrentino’s use of them often tended to parody and burlesque). Sorrentino was “alt lit” only in that he offered alternative strategies beyond simple storytelling, not because he disdained the appeal to aesthetic order altogether.

Sorrentino’s iconoclasm is perhaps more apparent in the “content” of his work, not just in his lampooning of bohemian attitudes or academic pretension or middle-class sexual mores but in his radical skepticism about human nature and the crass sensibilities that dominate American culture. Sorrentino is an iconoclast most clearly in his criticism, which on the one hand champions writers Sorrentino believes are undervalued, but on the other also unleashes some uninhibited attacks on those he thinks are not just overrated but degrade the artistic standards of literature. These strong opinions, which can seem peevishly dismissive, along with his portrayals of unredeemed human degradation, no doubt for some readers conveyed the impression Sorrentino’s work was even more formidable than his unfamiliar formal strategies already suggested it must be.

But idol-smashing was not in itself the primary goal motivating Sorrentino’s work. It is the necessary initial gesture implicit in his larger project of reorienting the aesthetic expectations of readers who assume that narrative form is the only form that might give shape to a work of fiction. To rebuild the formal structures of fiction, the old structures must first be razed, but Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction is ultimately more about what can replace the structure that was leveled than the mere act of subverting existing arrangements. It doesn’t go too far to say that Sorrentino would like us to take delight in the formal variations he offers in each of his novels. In this sense, Sorrentino’s fiction has an affirmative purpose, but it is an affirmation of the capacity of art—specifically literary art—to renew itself through the exercise of imagination.

This was certainly what most captivated me when I began reading Sorrentino’s fiction. I found Sorrentino after I had already discovered other postmodern innovators such as John Barth and Robert Coover, but encountering Mulligan Stew made me think I had come upon a writer who upped the metafictional ante over even Barth and Coover and had dazzling comedic skills that encompassed satire but went beyond the merely satirical to create a kind of absolute comedy that takes nothing seriously, including itself. (Later, upon reading M.M. Bakhtin, I found the critical perspective that would accurately describe this kind of comedy as “carnivalesque.”) While none of Sorrentino’s post-Mulligan Stew novels quite attempted to replicate its audacious structural complexity, nor to repeat its outrageous devices in the same encyclopedic way (although the latent comic attitude would always remain), Sorrentino’s subsequent work continued consistently to challenge literary convention, each new release promising its own sort of originality and surprise.

What I also discovered is that most mainstream reviewers did not really know how to account for Sorrentino’s literary project. Most seemed to expect that a Sorrentino novel would violate the established norms with which they were familiar, but, while critics would usually acknowledge Sorrentino’s writing skills in general, the typical response to the formal provocations encountered in his work was that he was engaged in “playing games,” that he seemed disdainful of the imperative to be accessible to ordinary readers. Although there were certainly critics who appreciated Sorrentino’s adventurous ambitions, very little effort was made in the prevailing outlets of literary journalism to ponder his alternative literary strategies more deeply or to consider seriously the notion that the norms observed by most writers of fiction might be deficient and in need of revision. Sorrentino was left to assume the reputation of an incorrigibly eccentric writer little interested in appealing to the general reader, and his later novels, although in some ways indeed more accessible to the average reader, were not really much reviewed in the most popular mainstream publications at all.,

Sorrentino had his champions, and he did rather better among academic critics, at least in depth of analysis, if not in the amount of attention paid to his work in comparison to other writers perceived as “postmodern.” Indeed, only one book by an academic critic, Louis Mackey’s Fact, Fiction, and Representation, has been devoted entirely to Sorrentino’s work (and it examines only Crystal Vision and the three novels comprising the Pack of Lies trilogy). William McPheron’s Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography usefully lists critical essays written about Sorrentino (as well as reviews of Sorrentino’s books), but this book was published in 1993 and has not been updated to cover all of Sorrentino’s career. Many of the critical considerations by academic critics are more interested in using Sorrentino’s work to exemplify broader philosophical issues that his inveterate self-reflexivity and breaking of form (especially in Mulligan Stew) tangentially raise, or in placing Sorrentino’s fiction in a taxonomy of postmodernism, so that neither the full range of Sorrentino’s aesthetic strategies nor the distinct progression of his work as a whole are as well-appreciated as they should be for a writer of Sorrentino’s accomplishments.

My current effort here, then, is to contribute in some small way to advancing this more complete view of Sorrentino’s career as a writer. It isn’t as expansive as a critical biography might be, or as detailed in its close readings as a more focused analysis of an individual work can be, but it attempts both to survey all of Sorrentino’s published writing from his beginnings as mostly a poet through to his final, posthumous, novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, and to consider the various aesthetic objectives informing Sorrentino’s approach to the creation of literary art. Although Sorrentino is most often described as an “experimental” writer (and this is the category in which I myself initially placed him), the longer view of Sorrentino’s body of work reveals that his aesthetic purposes are in fact multifarious, if ultimately all unified in an effort to discover the still unrealized potential of fiction as a form of verbal art. Sorrentino is indeed an experimental writer, but that word in itself does not describe the specific strategies, accentuated to different degrees in different works, by which he effects his distinctive manner of experiment.

Thus this book is organized more or less chronologically (some slippage with the final books), but also according to an analysis of these multifarious purposes as they are manifested in particular works. I have identified what I believe are the separable but ultimately integrated aesthetic modes that are prominent in Sorrentino’s practice, each of which is more predominant in some of the novels but are also present in many of the others. This allows the opportunity to emphasize the panoply of strategies Sorrentino employs, while acknowledging his underlying commitment to formal innovation and the self-sufficiency of literary language. These commitments are what unites all of Sorrentino’s fiction and mark it as among the most distinctive in postwar American literature, but they do not determine the specific narrative devices—or whether narrative is even present—that Sorrentino chooses to use, or preclude the possibility that an individual work might pursue specific kinds of effects that Sorrentino’s formal designs also make possible, as I hope my discussions of each of Sorrentino’s published novels will show.

Some of Sorrentino’s works, of course, have been more widely discussed than others, and while I give ample attention to books such as Mulligan Stew and Crystal Vision, I also try to give extended consideration to all of his books, in some cases more extended than is generally available through extant critical commentary on Sorrentino, especially the later ones (after the Pack of Lies novels). While Mulligan Stew will no doubt remain the Sorrentino novel most likely to find its way onto reading lists dedicated to postmodern fiction, and his early work up through Crystal Vision will likely attract most new readers, familiarity with the shape of his whole career can only enhance appreciation of Sorrentino’s strategies in those novels, as well as perhaps encourage interest in the lesser-known titles (some of which are out of print). The subtitle of this book promises an “introduction” to Sorrentino’s work, but it is really more accurately an attempt to re-introduce a writer whose work arguably most purely embodies the practice of “experimental fiction” in postwar American writing.