Introduction: New Narrative

Abstract

Introduction:New Narrative Rob Halpern (bio) and Robin Tremblay-McGaw (bio) The only thing that interested them was a satisfactory expression of their own lives, concretely rendered.1 Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps Forty years after the second issue of the San Francisco 'low-fi' mimeozine SOUP devoted itself to New Narrative, which by all reasonable expectations ought to have been an ephemeral movement memorialized at the moment of its nomination—the sort of phenomenon that Guy Debord called "the passage of a few persons through a rather brief moment in time"—it may be safe to say that New Narrative has at last become 'a thing,' having found its traction in the academy as well as in the community, and among a generation of emerging scholars, artists, poets, and writers.2 Debord, of course, was referring to a more ambitiously self-styled 'movement,' or 'anti-movement,' whereas New Narrative lacked the requisite determination to be either. However, what it lacked in ambition, New Narrative compensated for in its joint commitments to literary experiment and community life, commitments strong enough to attract a still expanding band of fellow-travelers engaged with experimental literatures, sexual politics, queer histories, and community archives. In October 2017, for example, UC Berkeley hosted the Communal Presence Conference on New Narrative, organized by younger scholars Daniel Benjamin and Eric Sneathen. The conference felt like a long overdue debutante's ball, more of an arrival party than a commemoration of [End Page 263] something over and done with. That date also signaled the long-awaited publication of Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997 (2017), a capaciously curated volume of New Narrative texts co-edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian; as well as From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (2017), a collection of essays edited by yours truly, addressing New Narrative by a range of writers working both in and out of the academy. In the afterglow of the aforementioned 'events,' our aim in co-editing this special issue of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory was to see what additional work might constellate around or in the vicinity of New Narrative, with the hope of complicating the nomination and its history, while honoring both and assuming the permission to lean into its instability and mutability. As for the backstory: the emergence of New Narrative and its commitment to literary storytelling as a way of making a community, and the friendships that constitute it, more transparent to itself is by now an oft told narrative, one we've rehearsed elsewhere.3 And yet, we continue to ask ourselves: how does our editing frame a story of New Narrative? What's at stake in telling it this way, rather than that? So, yes, once upon a time in San Francisco, the late 1970s and 1980s to be less than exact, a small cadre of writer-friends—Steve Abbott, Robert Glück, and Bruce Boone, who, together with Camille Roy, Kevin Killian, and Dodie Bellamy, comprised a core group of New Narrative writers—asserted the critical and imaginative values of sexuality, identity, and storytelling for a socially engaged and formally innovative writing. At a time when 'self' and 'story' were arguably considered retrograde by the avant-garde of the US writing scene within which New Narrative located itself, these writers casually theorized their practice as they elaborated a range of tactics negotiating writerly pleasure, self-fashioning, social engagement, and reflexive accountability.4 A complementary way of telling a story about New Narrative might situate it close to emerging Queer performance art as it mobilized the representation of gay sexualities and the social struggles around those representations. In Spreadeagle (2012)—a novel whose writing spans nearly two decades—Kevin Killian captures this dimension of the movement with all the extravagance of his inimitable similes, while describing the work of Sam D'Allesandro, a writer associated with New Narrative who died of AIDS in 1988 and who returns to life in Killian's writing: "He had [End Page 264] put poetry aside and was writing prose now, longish prose narratives, texts that explored and deconstructed...