Brain-Droppingly New

At The Mumpsimus, Matt Cheney ponders the meaning of the word "experimental" when applied to fiction. What relationship does "experiment" have to "story" in fiction? Does an experimental writer need to be proficient in story-telling before departing from its conventions?

. . .Why should an artist's ability in one mode be a determiner or critique of the artist's ability in another mode? Does the fact that somebody can "write a good, old-fashioned story" make you like their experiments any more than you would otherwise? Plenty of people write bad stories with "the rules", so why is it worse when people write bad stories without them?

And Matt further astutely observes:

. . .What sometimes gets forgotten in the arguing back and forth between traditionalists and mad scientists is that just because a piece of writing scorns familiar literary customs and conventions doesn't mean that it exists without its own customs and conventions. It is against those customs and conventions that the work can be analyzed and evaluated. The burden lies in the work itself, for it must offer some clues as to how it can be constructed in the reader's mind. Even Finnegans Wake, one of the most obviously experimental books in English, follows a system that can be interpreted, and (with some work) readers can judge for themselves how much the book's goals are ones they are sympathetic to, and how well they think it meets them.

Matt doesn't come to a settled conclusion, but seems to come down on the side that would have experimental fiction judged by the standards such fiction implicitly sets up for itself--how effectively has the author carried out the task he/she has set for the work? With this I completely agree.

At Pseudopodium, Ray Davis insists, correctly, that we consider context:

Outside a historical context, terms like "craft", "good story", and "experimental" are little more than Whiggish fertilizer.

Nothing I've read in the past few years can compare with the experimentation of Tom Jones or Wuthering Heights, but we don't see Mark Amerika giving them props. Me, I don't think Beckett ever again wrote anything as brain-droppingly new as Watt; I think of his last thiry years as laying down a very good groove and think of John Barth's later career as safe shtick. . . .

And that:

What seems blandly normal or tediously artificial to the reader may have been a coltish celebration of new skills for the author.

If Melville chafed against the limitations of the autobiographical sea story while writing Typee, it doesn't show. The sincerity of Modernist poets' juvenilia is hardly its besetting problem.

Ray has similarly reminded us, both in other of his own posts and in comments on some of mine, that historical context can help us think more clearly about what seem to us novel and urgent problems that really aren't. It is indeed a "besetting problem" of much literary discussion that it proceeds blithely along without any sense that what seem to be issues of pressing concern to us have been pressing on writers and readers steadily and for a very long time.

In the case of experimental fiction, however, I would suggest that a usefully pragmatic distinction can be made between "experimental" in the broadest sense--what writers always do to expand their literary horizons--and "experimental fiction" as a particular mode or tradition of writing, going back indeed to at least Tristram Shandy, that explicitly asks us to consider and reconsider what (where) the artistic boundaries of narrative fiction actually are and what compelling alternatives to conventional narrative ought to be accepted as artistic accomplishments despite their disregard of narrative conventions. All of the writers Matt Cheney discusses--Burroughs, Barth, Joyce, Beckett, Woolf, David Foster Wallace, and Carole Maso--belong to this tradition, but I don't think Fielding or Emily Bronte, Flaubert or Melville, really do.

Comments

[Ray Davis]

Thank you for the kind reading and challenging response.

I'm prone to note resemblances, which is fine, but then rhetoric sometimes tempts me to go too far. So I might talk about a "tradition" of presumptious lyric, and in that jumble together some unaristocratic Tudors, some Restoration satirists, Keats, the Objectivists, the New York School, and Language poets. I suppose somewhat the same impulse determines Oxonian anthologies and encourages such after-the-fact categories as film noir, nationalist canons across the world, and women's writing.

In your brief overview of "experimental writing," there's a temporal gap between "Tristam Shandy" and James Joyce's career. Do any books fit in there? I ask partly because I think I'd like them, and partly because explicit experimentation *as a tradition* would seem to require a firmly established norm, and I'm not sure when the particular narrative conventions being fought became firmly established, or how long it took before insurgent tactics became narrative conventions in their own right.

I also wonder about the conceptual gap between a single book and a career. "Tristram Shandy" stays just as wonderful but becomes slightly less startling positioned between the "Sermons of Mr. Yorick" and "A Sentimental Journey"; Sterne-as-career becomes slightly less startling positioned between the polyphonic digressions of sixteenth and seventeenth century English fiction and the sentimental, didactic, and political novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Even before an "oppositional" tactic becomes group property, it may be a personal habit. Is a writer who attempts something drastically new in each new publication only as "experimentalist" (to use Steve Mitchelmore's word) than a writer who challenges narrative convention the same way every time? (I'm not denigrating the latter, by the way; I believe in the power of the groove.)

Conversely, early Joyceans proved that it was easy to miss the formal ambitions of "Dubliners" and "Portrait" without "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake" to foment suspicion. One might read "Moby Dick" as a (failed) conventional narrative, but can one say the same of "The Confidence Man"? 150 years after "Madame Bovary", we might take it as conventional, but I believe Kenner is right to draw Joyce's artistic ambitions directly from Flaubert: "A Simple Story" to "Dubliners", "Sentimental Education" to "Portrait", "Temptation of St. Anthony" to the later episodes of "Ulysses", "Bouvard and Pecuchet" to Leopold Bloom -- and, on a different trail, to Beckett's "Mercier and Camier".

And there's that final gap between the isolated heroic figures of the modern canon and a contemporary American school of writers who share some publishers, make livings in academia, and swap blurbs, bridged by the pulp-sprung and compulsive Burroughs.

Well, I'm afraid all this gap-minding sounds both more detached and more combative than my feelings justify. You yourself call it a "pragmatic" distinction. I suppose my uneasiness truly comes down to worrying just what use our pragmatisms get put to. Provisional categorization can work as a portal of discovery. (Jerome McGann's championing William Morris as the first Modernist is a delightful example of what can be done with hindsight genre.) But windows require walls, and human beings do seem to love their wall-building. Once we have our categories up, it may be hard see around them. If I'm not mistaken, a similar uneasiness stirred your "Don't Change" entry of September 22.

I suppose I sound as if I'm trying to eradicate distinctions, when what I'd like is to make them finer.

[throatwobbler]

One small point on experimenting: Take a look at a lot of "experimental" literature (on the web, esp.) and you find a lot of junk. Inspired junk, perhaps. Or worse, the color-by-number experiments; you know, adding a mermaid to a story or having a Pringle as an unreliable narrator.

Most experimentation is better if the writer knows about literature and thinks about it and understands it, process and particle. This is true in the other arts--see Picasso in painting, Schoenberg in music--and I can't see why it would be any different in writing.