Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Hans-Wolfgang Schaller: The Survival of the Novel: E. L. Doctorow's Escape out of the Postmodern Deadend

ethical and aesthetical system based an the principles of good and bad, true and false, beautiful and ugly

1 . Writing fiction becomes something radically different from what we knew it to be. Freed of the mimetic obligation to represent reality and to adhere to the rules of plausibility writing becomes a creative process spinning out contents of imagination without the obligation to adhere to such things as facts, which, according to theory do not exist anyway in any kind of meaningful contexts. This is where the provocative notion comes from that the novel is dead. The end of fiction is marked by terms such as "surfiction", metafiction", "non-fiction fiction". Ever since Ronald Sukenick provocatively announced in a title of one of his books "The Death of the Novel and Other Stories" (1969) this catch-phrase has been repeated by authors and scholars alike. William H. Gass noted in 1972 "..the novelist, if he is any good, will keep us imprisoned in his language - there is literally nothing beyond"

1

2. Literature thus itself becomes a piece of reality to be experienced by the reader and estimated for the immediate pleasure it gives but it cannot have any inherent meaning, ethical or otherwise. The dividing line between fictional texts and non-fictional accounts begins to blur and even literary criticism emerges as imaginary writing an the pretext of a literary text, but in itself it is ontologically of the same kind as literature itself. Maybe that is one reason for the enormous output of literary criticism in the last decades. If you are no longer obliged to reasonably discuss matters and to show aesthetic or ethical values inherent in literature than the production of rambling and theoretically vaguely interesting texts becomes a lot easier. 1

1 Raymond Federman, „Surfiction

—Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction", in: Federmau, Raymond, ed., Surfiction: Now ...and Tomorrow, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975, 23-31, 8. 12 .„. William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, New York, 1972, 8. 91