Clarence Major's innovative fiction.

"In a novel,"Clarence Major told interviewer John O'Brien "the only thing you really have is words. You begin with words, and you end with words. The content exists in our minds. I don't firm it has to be a reflection of anything"(130). With this statement Major separated himself from the dominantly realistic tradition of both commercial publishing and the academic canon and identified his work with the disruptively experimental style being explored by writers emerging in the 1960s and flourishing in the 1970s and '80s. Whether crafted by Clarence Major and Ishmael Reed or by Ronald Sukenick and Donald Barthelme, such anti-realistic (and even anti-mimetic) fiction has been distinguished by its polemical opposition to the established principles of literary form. These finished novels and short stories are by no means imitations of an action or reflections of the world; instead, works such as Emergency Exit and My Amputations are additions to the world, real things in themselves to be admired for what they are, not as transparent windows to or representations of some pre-existing reality.

That fiction should not be offering a representation marks a change in its historical development, a change Major sees as necessitated by social and technological forces that have made life and our tools for recording it so different from conditions in previous times. Television can give us the news, innovative fictionists argue; novels and short stories can better express our response to the news. And so as the camera's invention prompted painters to experiment with increasingly radical forms of abstraction, our current saturation with television news, print journalism, popular history, and autobiography have challenged fiction writers to find new ways of producing their work. The result has been a transformation of subject matter from a topic of fiction to a record of the writer's activity, a process Roland Barthes has described as restructuring the infinitive to write as an intransitive verb(11). Elements of the real are certainly present in such writing, but under no illusion that they are the work's point. Instead, Clarence Major reminds his readers at every stage how he is using these materials to create a fiction. There is no suspension of disbelief. Quite the contrary: The reader is often asked to help create the work, making his or her reaction an important part of the story.

For all of its abstractness, there is a strongly personal cast to Major's fiction. Part of his anti-illusionistic strategy is to deal with these elements honestly, to use the energy and excitement of his reaction to these events as the substance of his narratives. Although raised in Chicago (on the mid-South Side), his occasional visits to his Georgia birthplace and an especially memorable summer spent there supply the emotional background for both early and recent novels. The Chicago shows are present in his first novel All-Night Visitors (1969), as are the New York City environs Major experienced as a young professional His early aptitude for art, which led to a brief fellowship at the Chicago Art Institute following high school, shows itself in the lyrically expressive style of Reflex and Bone Structure (1975) and especially in Emergency Exit (1979), which includes the author's paintings as integral components of the narrative. Widely traveled as a visiting professor and writer-in-residence, Clarence Major has drawn upon his European experiences for the structure and fabric (and not just topicality) of his equally ambitious novel My Amputations (1986); his own self-portrait graces the cover, a painting of the painter at work on the picture we see. Not in the least metafictive, this disposition to use one's own energy of life is part of a larger, sometimes submerged current in American literature that reached from Whitman and Toomer to William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, and Amiri Baraka (notably in Baraka's early fiction written as LeRoi Jones). The strongest element of person in Major's work is the self-conscious act of creation. The writing of each novel is its ultimate subject - not metafictively, as the writing reflects itself, but as the record of the writer at work. This record, like the evident pattern of Jackson Pollock's gestures in one of his action paintings, is the most personal part of Clarence Major's life to be shared.

The resulting fiction is brashly self-apparent, and and this proud, assertive spirit translates itself into the character of Eli Bolton, Major's first protagonist As the narrator of All-Night Visitors, Eli does a good job of reconnecting art with experience, experience being something quite apart from historical reality. "History" and "reality" are, after all ideas, and neither sums up what Eli Bolton feels he is: "I am not a concept in your mind, whoever you are!" The way he expresses himself is equally brash:

My dick is my life, it has to be. Cathy won't ever come back. I've stopped about the possibility. Eunice has of course gone away to Harvard, and I'm taking it in stride. My black ramrod is me, any man's rod is himself.(4)

As in the novels of Henry Miller, the self-creative is sometimes the procreative, and the hero marks his path through life by means of his seductions and seizures. Above all Eli refuses to be categorized, against a tradition of socially relevant and all-too-predictable characters, he reminds us that ". . . whatever I happen to be doing, I am not your idea of anything" (5). Everything he encounters is expressed in a corporeal way: violence on the street, the bloody display of a slaughter operation at the stockyards, and especially sexual encounters (a fellatio episode, for example, runs twelve pages). At times the violent desription becomes so intense that it is difficult to identify geography, as urban Chicago blends with combat in Vietnam. All-Night Visitors discards coherent plot and measurable chronology as well; it is instead an emotionally expressive record of its protagonist's imagination. Major's page is an area for this mind's action, as attention flies from Chicago to Southeast Asia to New York City and beyond.

If the novel has a structure, it would be the series of encounters with various women characters. Tammy, Cathy, Eunice, Anita, Clara, Hilda, and once again Tammy - the names blur into one collective personality, the woman perceived as Other, as Eli's sexuality reduces their individual identities (teenage runaway, middle-class careerist, prostitute) into a primal sense of woman-as-object. This is not to say that the protagonist himself isn't determined by their sexuality: The novel's central focus is Cathy's decision to leave and how Eli is panicked to the point of killing her to keep her with him. Every moment is an intense one, experienced as it is in such a writerly way that even the most mundane scene is liable to explode into expression at the outer limits of control:

As the old man comes toward us, die evil in his encroached face causes him to suddenly blow up with him. Every moment behind an earthquake. The vast immodest sound, Me liquids of his body, the spermy-substance of his brains shoot out, his eyeballs, rebellious question-marks, hang down suspended on long slimy patheticus strings from his sockets, Eunice's hand, inside mine, tightens, "Oh, damn - look at That poor man - He's having a heart attack!" The gooey stuff splashes in nearby plates of food, customers jump back in their waiters, an old woman with a bust as big as a bathtub drops her monocle, falls over backwards in her chair, her floor-length gown flying over her head, her sick. size legs, juggling frantically for some balance, her rich, pink Playtex girdle is even drenched with the juices from the explosion - I wonder why some of the folks are beginning to hold their noses: then it hits me, the odor of the substance from the waiter's skull smells like shit. He is a lump of slimy flesh and starched garments, on the floor. Eunice is pulling at my sleeve: "Please, let's go, I'm getting sick. I can't eat here." Eunice, even before we reach the street, is gagging.(43)

Like a jazz musician piling chorus after chorus of improvisation upon a basic chord structure and melody, Major has taken the simple scene of a waiter's hostility and pushed the writing of it as far as he can, with detail after egregious detail and each piece of action striving to outdo the last. As action writing, it is more expressive than expositional. And it is the sum of this expressive energy that constitutes the novel.

The tempo of street life and the urging potency of young manhood create the expressive style of All-Night Visitors. NO (1973), Major's second novel, draws upon entirely different types of feeling: the sentimentality of a youth's first remembered years, and the somnolent ease of a Georgia summer (contrasted to the harsher and faster world up north). The story takes place as two voices - one in conventional print, the other in smaller, indented passages - pass the action back and forth. Expression reflection; action, reaction, activity, memory-these two sides to every question expand the novel's emotional scope and give it the characteristics of immediacy and recollection combined. Sexuality is again an interest, but here as perceived by young children who never get a clear picture but whose imaginations are all the more empowered to fill in the gaps with marvelous invention. The narrator is a budding Eli Bolton:

I have a weak bladder and I consciously long to overthrow all my Christian hangups! to be equipped with the blessings of no inner pressure ebbing my spirit and psyche, and ultimately to strip naked, body and mind, and stroll casually out into wider and wider circles until I cover the world with the beauty of what I have discovered.(22)

Yet before this can happen, there is youth and adolescence to go through, watching the habits of others and developing an approach to the world and its values. Perception is all, short only of finding the proper words for things. Slavery in the past and racial discrimination in the present, for example, are characterized by language from the penal code. When someone dies, it is an occasion for irony: "They brought him back to the house in a casket and he was puffed up and without color but in a black suit he looked for the first time like somebody important and now it was too late to look that way"(121). As in any work of memory, time is a relative matter, and in NO the temporal is something that "took up space just happening"(122).

The novel's central event is shocking: A father murders his family and himself because he "ain't going to see [them] suffer no more (138). NO makes it dear that this is the character's only possible act of freedom in a world that created him according to its own perceptions and prejudices. The narrative ends with its young protagonist's having grown up and headed north, yet still seeking an identify-through lovers, work, and the very meditations that from the novel we now read.

Reflex and Bone Structure, Major's third novel, is a perfectly executed example of a narrative whose subject is its own creation and whose making takes place at virtually every point of action. To translate this effect into a manageable story, the author projects a narrator grieving over the loss of his lover - a situation familiar from All-Night Visitors and NO but which in Reflex and Bone Structure becomes a central obsession that generates the novel itself The first scene is a party at which the guests appear as barnyard characters, an indication that subjective perception lies at the heart of the story. Later that night, as the narrator and his lover Cora return home, subjectivity is once again the creative essence of what happens:

We're in bed watching the late movie. It's 1938. A Slight Case of Murder. Edward G. Robinson and Jane Bryan.

I go into the bathroom to pee. Finished, I look at my aging face. Little Caesar. I wink at him in the mirror. He winks back.

I'm back in bed. The late show comes on. It's 1923. The Bright Shawl. Dorothy Gish, Mary Astor. I'm taking Mary Astor home in a taxi. Dorothy Gish is jealous.(3)

These episodes at the novel's start are instructive: The imagination, especially when aided by a transformative device such as television or old movies, effectively changes reality from the present to the past Moreover, within the privacy of one's home (or even of one's bed), the viewer, necessarily a voyeur, can project himself or herself into the action and become a part of it. A metafictive technique? Only to the extent that film itself is metafictive. Yet the technique is accessible to any audience; everyone can be transported into the alternative realities Reflex and Bone Structure creates.

When Cora leaves the narrator's projected world, however, the issue becomes traumatic. Challenged by this affront to his ideal identity, he tries at the same time to tell what happened and to restore conditions to his own liking. Cora as a lost love becomes the focal point in a triangular relationship among her three lovers: Canada, Dale, and the speaker. There is never any doubt who is in control:

I'll make up everything from now on. If I want a commercial airline to crash with Cora and Dale doing it in the dark, I'll do that. Or have them go down at sea in a steamer caught in a violent typhoon near Iceland, or in an exploration vessel off the West Indies. I'll do anything I like. I'm extending reality, not retelling it.(49)

Above all, the narrator wishes to remind readers that he is not representing an action, but creating one himself - and that it is therefore in the quality of his own expression that the truth of his life may be found. Dale, for instance, is a difficult character for him to describe, since he lacks an empathetic understanding for him and at times feels outright hostility. The created characters are themselves, not distillations of someone else, and are drawn from the world's great intertext.

Get to this: Cora isn't based on anybody.

Dale isn't anything.

Canada is just something I'm busy making up.

I am only an act of my own imagination. I cannot even hear my own voice the way they hear it. I got the "Bullfrog Blues."

Cora does the "Charleston Rag."

Dale sings -Hello Dolly."

Canada covers the waterfront.(85)

The novel thus exists as a fury created work of the imagination, drawing its justification not from any fidelity to the outside world but rather to the expressive energy it transmits from the emotionally generative side of human existence. Its author writes it this way, and the characters so behave - adopting identities from jazz records they play and mystery films they watch on tv, existing as orchestrations of their author's most personal impulses.

With Emergency Exit Clarence Major confronts the most serious objections to such styles of fiction: that while the visual arts and music can indeed achieve fully abstract expression, the novel faces the limitation of having to take its shape from necessarily referential words. Major's answer is found in a useful structural device. Written in a way that emphasizes its components, Emergency Exit is first of all a novel of sentences: Dozens of them appear with no communicative intent, lodging themselves in the reader's consciousness for use later. Then come component paragraphs, vignettes, and finally self-contained stories. This arrangement is repeated throughout the book, until eventually a narrative fine develops that incorporates words and phrases from the initially abstract sentences. At this point, the reader's role takes over. Instead of using the words as signifiers for a reality already existing in the world, the reader is challenged to think back to the originally disconnected sentences in Emergency Exit. In this manner attention is being drawn inward, toward the novel being made, rather than outward to a world in representation. Emergency Exit is therefore its own reality, one the reader helps construct with each constituent part.

The story thus construed is a simple one: Al a ghetto kid, is in love with a rich and pampered young woman, Julie. Her parents have made the journey from Al's world to riches, so certain tensions are evident. Julie's father is having an affair, while her mother expresses certain interests in Al himself. Siblings get involved, as do friends. Meanwhile, the whole life of Inlet, Connecticut, goes on about them, including a curious "threshold law" taken straight from cultural anthropology yet applied without irony to this contemporary American situation. The love story emerges from these qualifying circumstances, which include an attention to the language that records reality (or perhaps creates it) and the tribal practices overseeing the characters' behavior. Throughout, Major as author practices a rigorous detachment, as the anthropologist must: At one point a game of tennis is recorded in terms of court positions and the relative sounds of the bah being hit. Forecourt or back, hard smash or lob - each person's typical behavior is encoded by his or her game plan, which the novelist dutifully records, thereby reminding readers how "characteristic" are the elements of character.

Although his work espouses an abstract style of expression, Clarence Major refuses to believe that he has ignored social problems. His counter-argument is that his type of fiction is more effective at changing lives than is the more conventional realism preferred in aesthetically conservative circles. In his collection of literary essays The Dark and Feeling (1974), he argues that "the novel not deliberately aimed at bringing about human freedom for black people has liberated as many minds as has the propaganda tract, if not more"(25), the understanding being that imaginative and spiritual freedom precede social liberation. And in a more recent essay, "Necessary Distance: Afterthoughts on Becoming a Writer" (1989), he explains how not just African-American music (including jazz and blues) have influenced the rhythms of his prose, but how all the music he's listened to, from Tin Pan Alley material to European Classical (208-09), has even further liberating his language from restrictions of the dictionary and the page.

Major's novels of the 1980s - My Amputations (1986), Such Was the Season (1987), and Painted Turtle (1988)-take the energies of his abstract expressionism and apply them to more apparently referential materials. In My Amputations, it's the world of European terrorists and expatriation in which an author with a background virtually identical to Major's has that identity seized by an imposter and set loose in the world while he himself languishes in prison. Having to recapture his reputation (and himself forces this protagonist to face the previously unbearable (and therefore avoided) polarities between Church and State, spirit and body, mentality and sexuality, and eventually "clean" and "dirty." It is in the middle ground of separation that he has been caught, and to fight his way out he must contend with political forces of both restrictive nationalism and uninhibited insurgency, providing in the process a fairly accurate roadmap of the personal politics in our time. Significantly, this initial return to the conditions of Western Europe leads in the end to a tribal sense of unity in Africa - pre-colonial and hence prepolitical - where the separations so vexing to the protagonist do not exist.

From here Major can direct his talents toward something as typically realistic as the family saga. Such Was the Season takes a nephew from Chicago to the Atlanta home of an o aunt who helped raise him, but result is anything but mimetic. Instead, the full range of African-American culture is explored, from the "bourgie" society to ed" power politics. In the hands of Major's first female narrator, the elderly aunt herself, the story becomes a study in language rather than social action, for the emphasis is not on the events but on her manner of weaving them into a narrative she feels comfortable with and can believe, which is of course the role Clarence Major's sexually expressive protagonists took in his earliest fiction.

Painted Turtle. Woman with Guitar is a similar narrative about a young Native American woman told from an over-the-shoulder point of view of a young Native American man who struggles to understand her expression through her folksinging in the often hostile world of Southwest cantinas and bars. The episodic adventures surrounding her work are just the superficial part of her story; at the heart of her expression is her poetry, passages of which are reproduced as transcriptions of her songs. Like Aunt Annie Eliza's constructions in Such Was the Season, those of young Painted Turtle do not so much reflect a world as build one:

Not long after Painted Turtle adjusted to the mensus's rhythm of twenty-eight days. Unseen Hands came and shot an arrow into her back.

I swear, rather than pain she felt a burst of joy....

Like a bird that doesn't know it can't swim, Painted Turtle dives into the lake for fish. When She brings it up, it's a song. She sings it:

My shell is tough

I shall be tough

Tough as my shell!(34-35)

Hers is a self-creating lyricism that motivates Major's recent short fiction as well, from the stories of Fun & Games (1990) to the disarmingly straightforward "Summer Love" in the Spring 1992 issue of Boulevard. Beneath all such expression is a generating sense of the self at work, constructing a world that is the evidence of its component parts allows readers the chance to participate in living the life of fiction, Major's idea of the most practical reality one can find.

Clarence Major's achievement, then, has been to show just how concretely we live within the imagination - how our lives are shaped by language and how by a simple act of self-awareness we can seize control of the world and reshape it to our liking and benefit. In Reflex and Bone Structure his narrator has suffered a grievous loss; from it comes the brilliance of creative genius but also the satisfaction of remaking the world in a supremely honest way:

I am standing behind Cora. She is wearing a thin black nightgown. The backs of her legs are lovely. I love her. The word standing allows me to watch like this. The word nightgown is what she is wearing. My nightgown itself is in her drawer with her panties. The word Cora is wearing the word nightgown I watch the sentence: The backs of her legs are lovely.(74)

Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. Major, Clarence. All-Night Visitors. New York: Olympia, 1969. -. The Dark and Feeling. New York: Third P, 1974. -. Emergency Exit. New York: Fiction Collective, 1979. -. Fun & Games. Duluth: Holy Cow!, 1990. -. My Amputations. New York: Fiction Collective, 1986. -. "Necessary Distance: Afterthoughts on Becoming a Writer." Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 197-212. -. NO. New York: Emerson Hall, 1973. -. Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1988. -. Reflex and Bone Structure. New York: Fiction Collective, 1975. -. Such Was the Season. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1987. -. "Summer Love." Boulevard 7.1 (1992): 148-59. O'Brien, John. interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973.