Unadventurous

In the previous post I cited John Dewey's notion of "adventurousness" as the quality I most look for in new writers and new works of fiction. I also admitted that often enough a genuinely "adventurous" work doesn't finally succeed in using an aesthetically adventurous technique, form, trope, or narrative to create a fully satisfying work of literary art, judging it by the terms set out by its own methods.

It is also possible for a novel or story to be adventurous (or adventurous enough) in its formal or stylistic strategies only to use such strategies to, in effect, dress up an otherwise entirely conventional narrative. This, it seems to me, is exactly what happens in Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days, which I have just finished reading.

The novel uses a number of devices--multiple narrators, shuffled chronology, various typographical flourishes (including a line of text, separate from the main text, that runs across the botton of the page and mirrors the act of "swimming" the main character has undertaken)--that most readers would no doubt find provocative, something different from the usual run of "literary fiction," but ultimately the story and the characters are entirely familiar, garden-variety elements of post-apocalyptic fantasy, yet another addition to the genre of which I take Our Ecstatic Days to be.

Like most such fantasies, a catastrophe has occured--in this case Los Angeles has turned into a lake--and the characters left to negotiate the wasted landscape do so by paring existence to the bone, surviving in an altered environment by taking nothing for granted and everything as contingent. Extremes of behavior (such as acting as an S&M mistress) no longer seem so extreme when extremity itself has come to define reality. In some way or another, the bleak world depicted in the novel is a projection of/version of/transformation of the present (in ths case, specifically Los Angeles), making this and most other apocalyptic fantasies essentially satires, but without much humor.

Thus, while reading Our Ecstatic Days I felt I had read it before, so familiar is its "vision" of the future. Furthermore, while I did find its formal features sufficiently interesting that I was able to finish the book, much of it, particularly the last fifty pages or so, was rather a slog. Eventually I had to conclude that the formal manipulations are really incidental to the vision of LA drowned that Erickson wants to express and that finally overrides all other considerations of character, point of view, style, etc. And since I am really no more interested in Steve Erickson's notions of what the future holds (or what it ought to hold, given our current derelictions) than I am in anyone else's--which is to say not much interested at all--I have to judge that the reading experience was ultimately not worth the effort expended. The typographical games notwithstanding, Our Ecstatic Days is still more concerned with the ideas its author wants to advance than with challenging readers to think and re-think about what novels can do.

In an interview at Bookslut, Erickson says "I don't think of myself as an experimental writer. Experimental writing is about the experiment, and experiments per se usually are for their own sake. My interest is in whatever serves the larger story or characters." So be it. I accept Erickson's sense of himself as something other than an experimental writer, as a writer more interested in "the larger story or characters." Unfortunately, neither the story nor the characters (most of whom are little more than ciphers) can elevate this novel beyond the confines of the genre in which it participates.

Comments

[Chris]

This is a really provocative post, and I've thought about it since it appeared. I wouldn't class Erickson among the major innovators, but I don't mean that to impugn his work. Rather, I think he's one of the more vital writers working today, if "vitality" can be defined (and I think it can) as actively trying to find a way to deploy techniques and approaches that have appeared over the past forty years. Given the hundreds of writers of "literary fiction" who ignore these approaches, or are expressly hostile toward them, Erickson's work is a sign of things continuing to move forward, if not by enormous leaps then by small steps. It's one thing to find Erickson's work wanting, but it's another to lump him with Richard Russo. That's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I would disagree with the assertion that Erickson's use of these techniques "dresses up" the conventional. Certainly it's a stretch to classify the Erickson novels I've read as conventional in any sense, especially given the meaning of "conventional" as understood by trade house publishing. To the extent that he is working within the confines of genre (another arguable characterization), he often is using such constraints to his advantage. In either case, "conventional" suggests something formulaic, or at least structurally consistent, and I've seen nothing to suggest that something countenancing modernist and postmodernist innovations has come along to replace Freytag's Triangle -- still the measure of the "well-made novel" by the lights of many influential book reviewers -- or to satisfy those reviewers' boundless desire for books with zippy plots, fully-wrought characters, overarching themes, lack of self-indulgence, and so on. I would suggest that, if anything, Erickson is working it the other way around -- like other very interesting writers working today, he's using the conventional to "dress up" the experimental, disruptive aspects of his work. That, or (a less cynical view) he finds aspects of a slightly older set of artifices still useful. Contemporary American writers who do this include Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Bret Easton Ellis, Percival Everett, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Toby Olson, Philip Roth, Stephen Wright, and many others. Some of these writers are more adventurous (or experimental) than others, but none of them is a revanchist.

Who cares how Erickson characterizes his own work? I can think of very few writers who care to describe themselves as "experimental." It's an inaccurate term, virtually begging for the narrow definition Erickson assigns it, and a pejorative one.

[Dan Green]

""conventional" suggests something formulaic, or at least structurally consistent,"

By "conventional" in this case I mean within the conventions of the post-apocalyptic fantasy. So many such narratives have appeared over the past twenty or so years (Erickson has, I believe, written several of them himself) that I do consider it a genre of its own, and I have to say I did find Our Ecstatic Days to be rather formulaic in its deployment of the genre. I could, however, have been clearer about how I was using the term "conventional."

[J.D.K.]

Erickson really is a conundrum, isn't he? I've read a couple of his novels and have been dissatisfied, not because of a lack of ambition on his part, but because of execution, or something like that. Rubicon Beach, and Our Ecstatic Days--they just lose steam at the end.

Because the term is overused, it's easy to lose sight of the importance of an experiment in fiction writing. The yield of an experiment is a new aesthetic experience, a new thing. To treat the novel as an experiment is a way making some new discovery. Breaking boundaries and going against conventions are not self-evidently valuable activities. But Benjamin and Adorno, for instance, and other Marxists, saw the work of art as instantiation of social conventions, of a status quo that limited the freedom of the individual and used him as a means to some end.

When I approach a work of art that I expect to be more than run-of-the mill 'literary fiction', I ask: what are its means of production. These means are not merely material--but they are the means, or conventions, by which the novel gets produced, the expectations of character, plot and so forth. With some authors, it is more or less clear in what way the means of production are being possessed or critiqued. It is easy, for instance, to see that Alfred Chester is freeing himself from the conventions of character in Exquisite Corpse. But with Erickson, I'm just not sure what the problem is. My guts tell me that he just needs to work a little harder--which is completely inappropriate, I suppose.

Anyway, sorry for sounding like such a encrusted old Marxist. I appreciate your criticisms on this blog; most stuff out there is just reviews and undue adulation.