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Constructivist Fictions (1974)

Constructivist fictions are built, rather than expressed; they originate, to a greater degree than other art, in those parts of the writer’s mind that are, in Mondrian’s phrase, “unconditioned by subjective feeling and conception.”

Constructivist fictions exist in space and time: the space of a printed page and the time it takes a reader to turn from one page to the next.

Conceived before they are executed, such fictions customarily reflect premeditated principles that are articulated within the work itself; the relevance and meaning of each detail are initially intrinsic.

The materials within a particular fiction constitute its predominant language, and how they change within the space and time of printed pages is the principal method of “storytelling.”

Constructivist fictions tend “to write themselves,” once their initial premises are established; the process by which they are made could be called “generative.”

They embody an intelligence that exists apart from their author, and this intelligence focuses upon matters of detail; constructivist fictions are intelligent in ways their authors might not be.

“Generative” is not the same as mechanical, for decisions of taste inform the genesis and operation of the work’s construction.

One recurring theme is variation and development within a systemic constraint.

Constructivist fictions extend the modernist tradition of mediumistic purification, in which forms and materials within the work represent little, if anything, beyond themselves.

In their literalism, in contrast to “realism” or “symbolism,” such narrative sequences could be characterized as “pure”; what the reader sees is most, if not all, of what there is.

The language of such fiction articulates height, width, shape, space, motion, and perhaps depth, in addition to interrelations among these elements.

Titles in constructivist fiction tend to be descriptive, and this description is usually verifiable, the title suggesting a primary meaning without exhausting the reservoir of possible secondary significances.

Structure within constructivist fiction is usually more explicit than implicit; the lines of activity are elemental and unadorned.

Syntax in these pieces tends to be systemic, for how a certain page relates to its immediate predecessors will influence, if not determine, how that page relates to its immediate successors.

Not one page but two or at most three should indicate crucial characteristics of the system.

Since every part has a particular appropriate place in a system of signs that is intrinsically evolved, nothing but nothing is arbitrary.

In constructivist fiction, as in every rigorously conceived and executed art, “mistakes” can be verified and thus can also be corrected.

The most distinctive marks of this work, to some minds, are not what it contains but what is excluded—in terms not only of materials but of evocative qualities; however, critical interpretations that emphasize omissions (e.g., “anti-fiction”) are invariably partial and obscure.

All literature represents transformations or reifications of the author’s experience; but the constructivist writer differs from others in emphasizing kinds of human experience—kinds of information and perceptions—that were previously foreign to literature.

The constructivist artist finds order outside himself, rather than within himself.

Constructivist artists eschew the representation of an object or a scene that is familiar in order to create a meta-reality that they regard as “true” (which mayor may not be true), but what is indisputable is the sense that the reality—the world of activity—of their creation stands first of all by itself.

Gabo and Pevsner suggested in 1920 that “art should stop being imitative and try instead to discover new forms.”

II

Constructivist fiction differs from journalism (and most current fiction) in being more general than particular; in this respect, it resembles classic literature.

Constructivist fiction is primitive in its taste for elemental forms and sophisticated in its operative assumptions; it represents an extreme, perhaps ultimate, development of formalism in fiction.

The author superficially resembles the child who moves the blocks around, but here his compositional principles are ultimately more sophisticated.

The idea of constructivist fiction is indebted to the visual works and theoretical writings of van Doesburg, Mondrian, Moholy-Nagy, among others; it acknowledges esthetic biases that have had scarce impact upon literary creation, especially in America.

Esthetic assumptions that once seemed “heretical” in painting, say, still strike most writers as “unthinkable” in literature.

Constructivism resembles Dada in its non-psychological outlook and its freedom with materials; it has little in common with “Surrealism.”

I would like to think that Moholy-Nagy could have written stories like these, had he decided to write fiction, because these works, like his, draw upon modernist traditions in all the arts—not just literature but painting and music as well.

Perhaps the most prominent current practitioner of constructivist fiction is Sol LeWitt—not in his three-dimensional objects but in such printed books as Arcs, Circles & Grids (1972).

Constructivist literature does not express personality, however idiosyncratic its style; yet a body of work undoubtedly reveals, in indirect ways, deeply personal proclivities.

Constructivist fiction is impersonal in content but personal in style. Reflecting neither nature nor personality, constructivist fiction exists in an autonomous realm, echoing nothing so much as itself.

Pattern articulates space in making not a single picture but a narrative.

The work could be called “Structural Fiction,” because of its emphasis upon structural development; but since it has no explicit relation to French “structuralism” in either philosophy or literature, that term would be deceptive.

Constructivist Fiction is very concrete (i.e., “characterized by or belonging to immediate experience of actual things or events” and or “formed by coalition of particles into one solid mass”).

He who feels draws; he who thinks patterns.

Since the “content” of even the best literature tends to be simplistic by philosophical standards, it is for something else that we turn the page—primarily the experience of effects intrinsic to the medium itself.

Constructivist fictions exist within and outside the traditions of modernist literature, within and without the traditions of modernist visual art.

Much of my own earlier visual fiction could be characterized as not “constructivist” but merely abstract, as I wanted to tell a story entirely within its own terms, with minimal extrinsic reference, using verbal titles much as an abstract painter does—to function as an entrée to one of the ways in which the images might be understood.

III

As the processes of its creation differ from those of most fiction, so must constructivist fiction be perceived differently.

Most readers of fiction, to be frank, have been trained to look for elements that, in constructivist fiction, are not immediately apparent, but closer examination will reveal how some of these traditional elements are present here in other languages, such as lines in visual space.

Reading constructivist fictions at a pace approximately similar to that demanded by a page of prose, one perceives the whole of a page and then the parts, which relate not only to the whole but also to the gestalts of the preceding pages.

Form is field is form is field.

Titles in these stories function much like this essay—to tell what the work is about, not what it is; there is no substitute for first-hand, unmediated experience of the work itself.

What might initially shock the experienced fiction-reader will become more accessible on second viewing or third; since the language of constructivist fiction inculcates the reader in itself, its mode of communication can eventually become more familiar.

Constructivist fiction is more spiritual than natural, more mental than material, more conceptual than perceptual, more empirical than ambiguous, more intellectual than emotional, more thoughtful than thoughtless, more biological than psychological, more synthetic than analytical, and more exterior than interior.

Constructivist fictions incorporate qualities indigenous to painting and music and yet remain narrative and thus literature; anti-literary in certain respects, they are pre-eminently literary in others.

One factor distinguishing constructivist fiction from a constructivist painting is the assumption that the former is, like the printed book, structurally sequential and infinitely reproducible.

Constructivist fictions differ from abstract animations primarily in their sense of pace: proceeding at a rate quite different from the automatic 24 frames a second of motion pictures, a visual narrative composed on printed pages acknowledges the time a reader takes to turn the page; the most appropriate mechanical analogue is slide projection.

Spatially, constructivist fictions acknowledge the framing functions of the printed page, resembling in this respect the appearance of traditional prose typography.

In constructivist fiction, circles and lines, say, can function as “characters”; their metamorphosis with its entanglements and denouements becomes the plot.

One aim of constructivist fiction is enlarging our capacities for narrative perception; the pleasures offered by this work are hopefully both sensual and intellectual.

Only by broaching a domain that initially strikes most readers as “not fiction” can a writer expand the possibilities of literature, for the mere consideration of unfamiliar materials allows both reader and writer to rediscover literary essentials.

Because this work is formally advanced, it is culturally progressive, teaching people how to perceive and assimilate something they have not experienced before; it also functions as an antidote to both artistic decadence and the literary-industrial complex.

These particular works embody such ethical ideals as purposefulness, constraint, purity and connectedness, in addition to the esthetic ideals of harmony, both visually and temporally, and complexity within simplicity.

In the chaos of human activity, one redeeming force is human constructive consciousness.

One critical issue in constructivist fiction is verisimilitude—the fidelity of every detail not to extrinsic reality, but to material that went before and material that follows, which is to say the fictional reality fabricated within the piece itself.

In systemic fiction, the scheme emerging from the whole is the principal theme—not only anterior but superior to any of its individual realizations; this generative content, though not evident on any particular page, is implicitly present throughout.

Constructivist fictions are susceptible to multiple interpretations but not to “ambiguous” ones.

The process of turning these pages ideally evokes sensations that must be defined as “esthetic,” in part because they cannot be classified as anything else; partially because these feelings are inexplicable except in their own terms, they can be characterized as “pure.”

One virtue of symmetrical organizations is purity; a second is verifiability; a third is impregnable stability; a fourth is the beauty of elemental, monumental forms.

“Mystery” is not a quality necessarily prerequisite to art; verification is not a process contrary to esthetic perception.

These fictions tell their stories in a language so universal that the works themselves need no translation; for non-English-speaking readers, only the titles need be glossed, ideally in a footnote.

The sculptor Naum Gabo said that he used the word “constructivist” to indicate that, “We want it to be known as a distinct form of art, different from other forms of art.”