23:2 Autumn 1971

ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON

Vietnam—Superfiction

Earlier issues of Chicago Review had addressed the Vietnam War through pieces on guerilla theater and a transcript from the protests outside of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the following piece by Alain Arias-Misson, the war is assessed through an experimental narrative form, “superfiction,” which was gaining interest during the period. Arias-Misson, who was a frequent contributor to the magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, recently explained how this piece came to these pages: “In those years I had practically adopted the Chicago Review—or should I say Chicago Review had adopted me, being a review wonderfully open to experimental writing—and published regularly in its pages. Perhaps because I took off with CR with my first published translations of the Catalan poet Joan Brossa with the editor at that time, Leonard Shaykin, and followed that up with an entire issue which I put together for editor Eugene Wildman.” Of “Vietnam—Superfiction,” of which a longer section appeared in the Autumn 1971 issue, he recently noted, “this piece was excerpted from my book of the same title; the book has been published in fragments in various magazines and anthologies in the USA and in translation in France. In the US the most extensive excerpt was reproduced in Writing under Fire, edited by Jerry Klinkowitz and published by Delacorte & Dell Books many years ago.” The magazine would continue to address the war through a special issue in Autumn 1972. Arias-Misson would continue his aesthetic experiments: an example of his visual poetry appears later in this retrospective issue.

[DN, 1996]

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