The Reading Experience

Readers in the English-Speaking World

    Among the many unsupportable assertions made by Stephen Marche in his semi-infamous 2008 diatribe against Alain Robbe-Grillet was the following:

The "new novel". . . as Robbe-Grillet defined and explained it in his famous 1963 essay, was high art at its unpalatably highest. It applied rules and regulations, opposed subjectivity and tried to dissolve plot and character into description.

I would challenge Marche to re-read Robbe Grillet's fiction, especially those novels written before the publication of For a New Novel, and try to make a case that any of these points can be sustained. Most of them, in fact, are precisely the opposite of what one finds in novels such as The Erasers, The Voyeur, and Jealousy, but I would like to focus in particular on The Voyeur as a work against which accusations such as Marche's simply aren't credible.

    Like its immediate predecessor The Erasers, The Voyeur is essentially a detective story, although the earlier novel (Robbe-Grillet's first) literally includes a detective in its cast of characters while The Voyeur asks the reader to do the detective work its story calls for. It includes a murder of a young girl and a possibly psychopathic killer, both of them elements that would seemingly be attractive to the "popular" readers Marche believes Robbe-Grillet spurned and as far from the assumptions of "high art" as one could get. What is missing from its mystery plot is a firm resolution of the mystery, and while this refusal to accede to the conventions of the genre might be frustrating to some readers, it also manifests a commitment to the depiction of life's complexities, which are not reducible to the neat resolutions of mystery stories. This commitment is not a characteristic of "high art." It is a characteristic of art.

    What most readers who find themselves alienated by The Voyeur would cite as their source of disfavor surely would not be its application of "rules and regulations" but precisely the absence of such rules. A proper novel of this kind (a proper novel in general) should establish a stable relationship between reader and protagonist, should lay out its plot as a discernable series of events and should ultimately fill in whatever gaps might be left over, should use description to fill out the narrative not to substitute for it, should leave the reader with the impression its narrative has been appropriately developed and completed.

    The Voyeur does none of these things. Its protagonist, a watch salesman named Mathias, initially provokes a mostly impassive response, although eventually we are led to exchange this neutrality for a more decisive attitude: either we are appalled and think Mathias is a monster on the loose or we have some sympathy for a character who is clearly insane and can't even remember whether he committed the act or not. Given that finally we don't know which person he really is, the original more affectless reaction seems the right one, but many readers might find this unregulated drift in our disposition toward the character unsettling.

    The Voyeur begins as a relatively straightforward account of a day the watch salesman spends on an island off the French coast, which is initially presented as the place where the salesman himself grew up. However, this item of information is not the first we come to suspect might be questionable. Soon enough the narrative begins to circle around itself--reflecting perhaps the figure-eight pattern that Matthias uses to navigate the island on his quest to sell watches--and to shuffle between past and present. We become uncertain whether Mathias is simply following his route or whether he is engaging in dissociative reveries. We become concretely aware of the murder of the young girl about two-thirds of the way through the novel, but there may be hints that something untoward has happened through these reveries or in the spaces opened up by disruptions of narrative continuity. The murder is the narrative's central event, yet it is the one episode in the novel that remains undescribed.

    Description is indeed a dominant strategy in The Voyeur, but only a passive and inattentive reader would conclude that it is used to "dissolve plot and character." Both plot and character are revealed through description, not annulled by it. Although the point of view in the novel is ostensibly third-person, we would be mistaken to take a passage like this, a description of the island's harbor as Mathias's boat approaches it, as originating in an "outside" narrator:

    The pier, which seemed longer than in actually was as an effect of perspective, extended from both sides of this base line in a cluster of parallels describing, with a precision accentuated even more sharply by the morning light, a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical: the crest of the massive parapet that protected the tidal basin from the open sea, the inner wall of the parapet, the jetty along the top of the pier, and the vertical embankment that plunged straight into the water of the harbor. The two vertical structures were in shadow, the other two brilliantly lit by the sun--the whole breadth of the parapet and all of the jetty save for one dark narrow strip: the shadow cast by the parapet. Theoretically, the reversed image of the entire group could be seen reflected in the harbor water, and, on the surface, still within the same play of parallels, the shadow cast  by the vertical embankment extending straight toward the quay.

This is what Mathias sees as he stares as the scene from the ship, but, more importantly, it is the way Mathias sees it, complete with the attention to specific detail and obsession with geometric patterning. These qualities are not just those that are brought to passages of description like this--and the novel contains many, many more--but help to constitute Mathias's character, help constitute him as a character. He is precisely the sort of man who keeps careful watch of himself and his surroundings and whose apprehension of the world takes special note of its geometric attributes--its existence as "a series of elongated planes alternately horizontal and vertical," etc. The "plot" in which he figures as the primary character, furthermore,  is not "dissolved" into description of this sort but is enabled by it, the "mystery" at its center evoked by it. Does the omission of description of the act itself signal that Mathias didn't do it, or that he did but can't bring himself to confront it? If the "real" is what is able to impress itself on Mathias's awareness, then the fact that the murder has not done so means he had nothing to do with it, or that there's only some reality he can face?

    These questions are not answered by one's reading of The Voyeur, and that is because, far from "oppos[ing] subjectivity," Robbe-Grillet builds this novel on it. The descriptions offered are not "objective" renderings of a reality presupposed to exist but indeed the subjective perceptions of an ultimately very flawed and uncertain character. The reality he constructs is a vividly rendered one, and it is the reality we as readers must also inhabit, but ultimately it is a rendered one. There is no reason why an approach emphasizing description must therefore necessarily be an approach seeking objectivity. A novel like The Voyeur leaves us with the conviction that subjectivity is all.

    In her book Inventing the Real World: The Art of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1998), Marjorie H. Hellerstein explains that Robbe-Grillet "began by looking into the possibilities of expressing subjectivity while seeming to be objective in descriptions without emotion." That Mathias's perceptions are related "without emotion" is probably what bothers someone like Marche, a characteristic he translates into a rejection of subjectivity. Marche believes that Robbe-Grillet "convinced a generation of talented novelists that there was something vulgar about attracting a popular readership," and presumably the lack of "emotion" in Robbe-Grillet's work acts as an impediment to this "popular readership." It's too "puritanical," too hostile to the "pleasurable" in fiction.

    I doubt that Robbe-Grillet would have objected had his books managed to reach a wider audience. This audience would, of course, have had to accept the books on their own terms, as harbgingers of a "new" fiction that renounces the easy pleasures of traditional fiction as distortions and misrepresentations of the very reality it was purported to be portraying. But I don't see why these books can't be taken on those terms, why they can't be enjoyed for their own ingenuities and mischievous challenges to our expectations. There is pleasure to be had in allowing one's assumptions to be challenged and following a work's alternative logic where it will lead, especially if that alternative logic provides new insights into the still possible permutations into which fiction writers might shape their work, which I believe The Voyeur and Robbe-Grillet's work as a whole does. Finally it seems to me that Stephen Marche is being "elitist" when he assumes that "readers in the English-speaking world" are incapable of reading in this way.

"I Wouldn't Explain"

A debut work that is explicitly identified as experimental--or in this case "unique and innovative," as the book's back cover has it--seems a useful opportunity to consider what "experimental" appears to signify to young writers aspiring to produce fiction worthy of that designation. Erin Pringle's story collection The Floating Order (Two Ravens Press) offers such an opportunity, and while I have some reservations about classifying it as experimental, I nevertheless found this book an impressive set of stories. It is certainly not an ordinary first work of "literary fiction" and for that reason alone commends itself to readers looking for more than the pallid and derivative exercises in convention most such fiction has to offer.

If an immediately observable characteristic of "experimental fiction" is an implicit questioning of the centrality of "story," with its attendant requirements of "exposition," "narrative arc," "backstory," etc., then The Floating Order initially meets this expectation. A few of the stories do ultimately include moments of action--even rather extreme action--but most of them either proceed in the absence of a chartable narrative line or in effect take place in a discursive zone in which the important events have already happened, the protagonist, frequently the narrator and frequently a child, continuing on while unavoidably returning to these events in a fragmentary and oblique way. The reader is asked to suspend final comprehension of the nature and the consequences of these events, but the gradual realization of their full import has a quietly powerful effect.

The collection's first, and title, story is a good example of this approach. Narrated by a woman who has, we ultimately determine, drowned her own children (a situation no doubt inspired by the Andrea Yates case), the "story" unfolds as a kind of spontaneous emanation of the narrator's disturbed mind, circling around the deed but not quite confronting it, freely shifting from past to present, often speaking of the dead children as if they were still alive. The story doesn't so much plumb the depths of the character's insanity as it spills that insanity onto the page through the narrator's free associations of memory--however dissociated--and detail. Ultimately the jumbled, distorted pieces of the story cohere into an affecting account of the narrator's troubles, and the impact is only heightened by the incremental way in which the horror of her experience is revealed.

"The Floating Order" also exemplifies the prevailng prose style of the stories in this book, a style that reflects a certain ingenuousness in the characters' perspective expressed in unadorned language:

I asked the policeman if he'd like some juice, as we were out of milk. He was polite. I explained that my babies are saved. He held my hand and opened the car door for me. Natalie sat in the passenger seat and played with the radio dials. I told her to stop it. The policeman asked who I was talking to. I wouldn't explain. My husband has such high hopes.

Many of the stories are narrated by a child, for whom this sort of low-affect discourse seems well-suited in its guilelessness, but it also has an almost hypnotic effect when applied to damaged adult characters like this one. The occasional shocks it delivers as revelatory images and bits of information punctuate the narrator's recitation effectively substitute for straightforward plot progression.

The author wisely chose to present what is perhaps the volume's best story first, but the next several stories are also quite good, reinforcing the themes and the narrative strategy introduced in "The Floating Order." "Cats and Dogs" relates the predicament of two abandoned children (the father is in prison), the nature of that predicament revealed in the same piecemeal fashion; in "Looker," a father struggles to convey to his daughter what her now dead mother was like as a young woman, although again we have to infer she is dead through indirect references ("Your mother shouldn't have smoked"); "Losing, I Think" fitfully unfolds a story of a mother raising a child without the assistance of a mostly elusive father; in "Sanctuary," a mover while transporting a piano from a church finds the corpse of a young girl inside it.

These stories establish an atmosphere of menace and foreboding that permeates the book and that the style and structure introduced in the first few stories evoke especially well. Children are portrayed as particularly vulnerable to the hazards of the adult world, and thus most of the stories in The Floating Order feature children, either as narrators or important characters, attempting to cope with the consequences of human weakness, or in some cases with what seems the random drift of existence. The second half of the book is not as effective as the first, featuring some stories that are a little too sensational ("Why Jimmy?"), too melodramatic ("Drift") or tug a little too much at the heartstrings ("And Yet"), but the best stories show a young writer seeking to reveal uncomfortable truths and challenge complacent reading habits.

However, I'm not sure "experimental" would be the appropriate term to use in characterizing Erin Pringle's fiction as represented in The Floating Order. Ultimately the stories work to create an overarching depiction of the lives of children in present-day America, and, the honesty of the depiction notwithstanding, this is a project all too familiar in first books (and sometimes later ones as well) by American writers. To the extent that the book does take risks in style and form, it does so, or so it seems to me, in order to first of all advance this project, the "content" elevated above formal experiment. I don't necessarily say this is a flaw in the book, although I do say that the effort to "capture" childhood in fiction has become rather hackneyed and that while The Floating Order surpasses most other efforts in this sub-genre of literary fiction, it tacks hard enough in the direction of "saying something" about childhood in America in purely sociological terms that I have to regard whatever is "experimental" in the book as secondary to this larger purpose of locating the stories within the sub-genre, however "dark" they may be.

In my opinion truly experimental or innovative or adventurous fiction attempts to expand the possibilities of fiction as a literary form and does so for the sake of the form itself, not to amplify social or cultural criticism or to intervene in philosophical debates (although these things might be an indirect effect, as is often enough the case in all worthwhile fiction). To question whether The Floating Order really signals that Erin Pringle will consistently produce such aesthetically challenging fiction, however, is not at all to diminish its achievement or deny its satisfactions.

 

Performing Its Own Self

Raymond Federman was generally associated with those American writers who in the 1960s and 70s began writing what is now called "metafiction," but there was always something about Federman's work that seemed different, its self-reflexivity even more radical and enacted in a more aggressive way. Where Barth and Coover laid bare the devices of fiction allegorically (J. Henry Waugh as "author" of his fictional baseball world) or through the occasional narrative disruption (the "author" making his presence known, as in Barth's "Life-Story"), Federman's fiction was more direct and unremitting in its undermining of narrative illusion. With its prose freed from the constraints of typographical bondage, climbing up, down, across, and around the page, and its "stories" of writers attempting to tell a story without quite succeeding, Federman's fiction as represented in Double or Nothing (1971) and Take It or Leave It (1976), still his most important books, challenged not only reader's preconceptions about fiction but also basic assumptions about reading itself.

Federman rejected both "metafiction" and "experimental fiction" more broadly as labels accurately describing his work, instead coining the term "surfiction" to sum up what he--as well as other innovative writers, such as Ronald Sukenick--was after. In his essay, "Surfiction--Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction," Federman defines the term:

. . .the only fiction that still means something today is that kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it: the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's imagination and not in man's distorted vision of reality--that reveals man's irrationality rather than man's rationality. This I call SURFICTION. However, not because it imitates reality, but becuase it exposes the fictionality of reality. Just as the Surrealists called that level of man's experience that functions in the subconscious SURREALITY, I call that level of man's activity that reveals life as a fiction SURFICTION.

I never really did quite get the last part of this formulation, that surfiction "reveals life as fiction." In the next paragraph, Federman adds: "fiction can no longer be reality or a representation of reality, or an imitation, or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY--an autonomous reality whose only relation to the real world is to improve that world. To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth." To "abolish the notion that reality is truth" is not, it seems to me, the same thing as revealing "life as a fiction." Denying that reality is the arbiter of "truth" does help to preserve the "autonomous reality" of fiction, but for fiction to be "a" reality, it would seem necessary that "reality" itself exist, to which fiction provides an alternative or a complement. If fiction is reality and life a fiction, then Federman is paradoxically valorizing realism after all, though not for "recreating" reality. Fiction is its own arbiter of truth, the realm where "life" is really to be found. This all seems a rather byzantine way to arrive at the conclusion that fiction is a creation, not a recreation of anything.

Indeed, if fiction is an act that "renews our faith in man's imagination," then it largely undermines the appeal to imagination to burden it with the task of rendering itself reality--unless you simply want to defend imagination as a process that's as real as any other human activity, and perhaps as revelatory of "life" as documentary-style realism. Certainly neither Double or Nothing nor Take It or Leave It themselves do very much to expose life as fiction, or, for that matter, "abolish reality." But they both do display the literarary imagination at its most adventurous through exploring "the possibilities of fiction" and by challenging " the tradition that governs it." It seems to me that these are impressive enough accomplishments that asking them further to disclose "man's irrationality" or to abolish reality only threatens to saddle them with extra philosophical weight they don't really need to bear.

The reader encountering Double or Nothing for the first time surely becomes most immediately aware of its inherent playfulness. Riffling through the book, one finds pages arranged in multiple shapes and irregular spacings, its words cascading here and there, printed in various fonts and shadings. Some pages don't so much contain writing as words arranged into images and pictographs. It is apparent right from the start that this is a work that challenges our assumption that when we pick up a novel we will be reading "prose" that unfolds through the usual, orderly blocks of print that define the reading experience in its most fundamental form. Both Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, which is also typographically adventurous, can be read as prose narratives of a sort--albeit narratives preoccupied with their own narration--but they at a minimum require the reader to consider his/her expectations of reading and to forsake dependence on the usual and the ordinary.

If the reader begins with the impression that Double or Nothing will be a mischievous, thoroughoing  challenge to the conventions that dominate the writing and reading of fiction, this impression should only be reinforced by the experience of the text itself, although that experience will surely exceed in its realization the pallid generalization of this description. The challenge of the novel is such that attentive readers will find it invigorating, an invitation to revise their notion of the reading experience as an essentially passive activity but also to find the kind of active reading it encourages a rewarding alternative. Above all, Double or Nothing is an entertaining novel, enjoyable to read in its very refusal to play by the rules.

The "plot" of Double or Nothing is announced--and more or less completed--in its opening lines:

Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lack himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facililities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York city, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person--a shy young man of about 19 years old--who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities, from France under the sponsorship of his uncle--a journalist, fluent in five languages--who had himself come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established, sometime during the war after a series of gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man--a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school--that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned. . . .

Immediately we are introduced in this passage to the structure and strategies that will be further elaborated throughout the text that is Double or Nothing. Though initially less radical than the typographical play still to come, the use of boldtype and italics here still seems disruptive, even arbitrary, although, as with all the other graphic devices in this novel, they actually work in part to substitute for more conventional grammatical and syntactical markers. The first boldfacing--"two or three weeks ago"--is clearly employed for humorous effect, but in general these interruptions provide a kind of rhythm and a different sort of visual orientation for a prose that otherwise abandons the traditional mechanics of prose.

The discursive situation set up here--a narrator relating the story of a writer preparing to write a story--is by now a recognizable move in postmodern writing, but in both Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It Federman uses this trope more thoroughly than almost any other postmodern writer, and in addition integrates it more seamlessly with the theme motivating his narrative maneuvers. Each of these novels takes as its secondary subject--the primary subject being writing itself--episodes in the life of a French immigrant to America whose biography in most ways mirrors Raymond Federman's. In Double or Nothing, this character's story is being told, or being attempted, by a second character, the "rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man" who is also a seeming facsimile of Raymond Federman in his later incarnation as writer. The difficulty of "getting it right" in recounting the experiences of the "shy young man" becomes the novel's central conflict, memory and fiction unavoidably merging as the middle-aged author struggles to get the story told. The story of the story is not just self-reflexive sport (although it is that) but also the most honest opportunity to get at something close to "truth."

This is perhaps the truth that fiction can provide, but ulimately what a work like Double or Nothing dramatizes is that the "truth" of fiction lies not in its fidelity to external events but to its own necessities. Federman uses his own "life experiences" as material on which to perform the imaginative turns fiction always performs, but in Federman's case the performance is made "concrete," conducted on the page without disguise. Double or Nothing is the epitome of that modern/postmodern text that, in Jerzy Kutnik's words, "not so much says something about reality but, by its occurence and presence, does something as a reality in its own right." I would add to this that it is a literary text that is allowed to "be something" as well. In both its emphasis on "performance" and its ultimate status as an object of aesthetic perception, Double or Nothing is less a rendering of experience (at least as a realistic representation of "life") than it is an experience "in its own right." In its very refusal to accept the established practices determining where the "art" of fiction is to be found, Double or Nothing establishes itself as art in the most compelling way possible, by providing the reader with a unique aesthetic experience.

Although Take It or Leave It continues to experiment with the dynamics of the printed page in an approach similar to Double or Nothing, it is both more and less radical than its predecessor. It contains fewer word-pictures and other extreme acrobatic notational flourishes, but it also takes the self-reflexive portrayal of the fiction-writing process even farther. Kutnik begins to get at this feature of Take It or Leave It when he notes of the twentieth century novel in general that often "the question 'What does ficton say (mean)?' was replaced by the question 'How is fiction constituted?' as the focus of the writer's attention" (37). Take It or Leave It moves ahead in the life of the "shy young man" to a period in which he is serving in the U.S. military and focuses on a single episode in which he drives from North Carolina to upstate New York to collect his misdirected pay and from which he intends to drive across the country for further deployment. Although he does finally make it to the first destination, the relation of the second leg of the journey is permanently deferred as the narrative is punctuated by various digressions and a kind of internal drama carried out by multiple versions of the author, in this case split into three roles, as well as the implied reader.

In addition to the fictionalized Federman (for the purposes of this novel named "Frenchy") whose story is the ostensible subject of the novel, we are confronted with two different "tellers" of the story, one presumably an older Federman/Frenchy, who conveys the younger Frenchy's adventures to a second teller, who takes on the job of official narrator and who is the stand-in for Raymond Federman, author of Take It or Leave It. Later, the second teller leaves the narrative for a while, so that Federman/Frenchy must temporarily tell the story himself, and at another point the novels implied readers (residing in the future) intrude on the narrative by sending a proxy to see for himself what the young Frenchy is really up to.

In this way the actual reader of Take It or Leave It is exposed to a representation of "how fiction is constituted," or, as Kutnik puts it, to "the novel's internal space as the place where the text gets written, where it performs its own self" (202). Yet, this evocation of the "inner space" is also wildly funny, making Take It or Leave It in its way one of the most entertaining novels of its time. To me, it stands with Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew as a great "postmodern" novel that is great because, while rejecting the elements of fiction writing most familiar to most readers, it manages to substitute for those elements a strategy that such readers could still enjoy if they gave themselves over to its alternative logic. Like Mulligan Stew, Take It or Leave It provides readers with a "good read" that is "good" both because it makes for a pleasurable reading experience and because in the process it stimulates the reader to reflect on the conventions of reading--conventions that might otherwise exclude novels like these as simply curiousities.

At the same time that Take It or Leave It attempts to undermine the authority of conventional approaches to the writing and reading of fiction, it also evokes one of the first great novels in the tradition, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Both are narratives about the impossiblity of producing a narrative that doesn't leave out everything that's important. Both illustrate this dilemma by hilariously interrupting the narrative in progress through seemingly endless diversions and divagations. Sterne's novel at the very beginning of the modern history of fiction questioned the adequacy of "telling a story" as the justification of the form, and Take It Or Leave It renews that effort as provocatively as any work of fiction since.

Doing Something as a Reality

In his book on the work of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman (The Novel as Performance (1986)), Jerzy Kutnik comments:

The rise of Action Painting, the Happening, The Living Theatre, John Cage's experimental music and Charles Olson's "projective verse," to name only a few examples of performance-oriented works of the 1950s and 1960s, forced many aestheticians to review the underlying assumptions of classic aesthetics. Performance was now seen as a category which could be made relevant to all art forms. Indeed, for the postmodern artist, performance was shown to be an essential element of all creative activity, a fundamental value in itself, an indispensable, even unavoidable, ingredient of the work of art.

But it should also be noted that performance is not something that, as a result of certain historical developments, was added as a new element in the creative process, for it had always been there, though ignored or suppressed. What was added, rather, was the awareness that all art is always performatory, that it not so much says something about reality, but, by its occurence and presence, does something as a reality in its own right. . . .

Although I am working on a longer post about Federman's fiction that will appear shortly and that will return to what Kutznick says here, I would like to more briefly discuss the implications of Kutznick's point as it applies generally to both "experimental" fiction and to the "aesthetic" approach to fiction as a whole that I pursue on this blog. 

Federman is a writer who directly and self-consciously engages in a "performance" strategy--anyone who picks up Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It will immediately encounter Federman's notational performance as his text spreads itself across and down the page in seemingly (but not actually) chaotic arrangements--but ultimately his work forces us (or should force us) to consider the extent to which the writing of fiction and poetry is always, as Kutznick points out, about doing rather than saying. While few fiction writers play around with "text" as explicitly as Federman (or Sukenick), poets have certainly always done so; thus, what Kutznick is really getting at is that the work of writers like Federman insists that fiction as well be a mode in which the writer "does something as a reality."

The great majority of literary fiction is overwhelmingly dedicated to the task of saying something. This is why the great majority of literary fiction is not worth reading. Not only do most writers of such fiction have very little to say in the first place--the "theme" of most literary novels can usually be reduced to platitudes--but whatever "performance" that is involved in the use of the elements of fiction is dull and familiar, at best focused on forwarding the theme most expeditiously. Much experimental fiction is also dull and familiar, reworkings of previous, and better, performances of other experimentalists. However, the departures from the norm to be found in even the most perfunctory experimental fiction does at least continue to remind us that it is possible to conceive of fiction as a practice in which form and language are malleable, the medium through which the writer may offer a fresh and distinctive performance.

Even from within the confines of conventional practices it is possible to write fiction that is more doing than saying. The enactment of point of view and narrative structure affords ample opportunities for "performance-oriented work," and the best fiction has always taken advantage of these opportunities. Style also can be an "ingredient" in the performance of literary art, as long as style is regarded as something other than, something beyond, "pretty writing" of the usual kind. Unfortunately, most attempts to manipulate these elements that I read (or start to read) are again usually carried out in the name of more colorfully reinforcing theme, not as a performance seeking out its own limits or capable of sustaining interest in and of itself.

As Larry McCaffery puts it in his foreword to Kutznick's book, writers like Sukenick and Federman (and, I might add, Gilbert Sorrentino and Stephen Dixon and David Foster Wallace, to name only three) show us that the most challenging fiction "seeks to be an experience for its own sake." This is precisely what John Dewey, the foremost proponent of "art as experience," had in mind when he extolled the achievement of "adventurous" art. Like all other such art, adventurous fiction enhances experience by encouraging us to attend more closely to performance, in the best cases a performance unlike any we've experienced before.

Some Other Kind of Structure

According to the Financial Times, a study published in Psychological Science concludes that an encounter with surrealistic art "enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions."

The idea is that when you’re exposed to a meaning threat - something that fundamentally does not make sense - your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment.

It would seem that this study indicates that "difficult" art, the kind of art that defies the audiences expectations of coherence--most immediately a coherence between the world depicted in the work and the audience's conception of the "real world"--actually motivates viewers and readers to try and make sense of it by finding alternative "structures." With surrealism this involves, presumably, finding a way to integrate a surrealistic presentation with one's prior conceptions of the way things are: surrealism becomes an alternative vision of the world, one that breaks from the "normal" perceptions most of us share only to portray that world just as truthfully if more obliquely. One rescues representation in surrealist art by acknowledging the challenge to it.

But "difficulty" in art and literature can manifest itself in other ways as well, on a formal and stylistic level that doesn't necessarily, or doesn't directly, result in a patently distorted view of the world. I believe that innovative, adventurous fiction of this kind can provoke the same kind of response in readers as that described in the PS study. In this case, the reader is asked to suspend the "normal" expectations one might have of fiction--which might be brought together through the notion of "transparency," transparency of language, character, event, setting, etc.--and to make new sense of the challenges to literary experience the work's deviations represent. Ideally, the reader is asked to scrutinze his/her assumptions and to conclude that perhaps the innovative device or practice might make its own kind of sense as a variation on established devices and practices. The reader will have "learned" that fiction might come in multiple forms and various styles, that where the art of fiction is concerned there is no normal.

However, the obstacle to enhancing the "cognitive mechanisms" involved in the reading of fiction is not most readers' inability to make this kind of adjustment but their reluctance to give unconventional fiction a chance to engage their attention in the first place. If they don't simply refuse to countenance such fiction at all, they approach it with the kind of desire for "identification" that makes any departure from the comfortable and familiar difficult if not unacceptable. I am not one to recommend a given work of fiction on the grounds that readers might "learn something" from it, but learning how to read more expansively can't be the least timeworthy use one could make of a book.

No Words For What I Would Say

The Oulipian strategy behind Paul Griffiths' short novel Let Me Tell You (Reality Street) is made plain on the book's back cover:

So: now I come to speak. At last. I will tell you all I know.... These are the words of Ophelia at the beginning of this short novel: literally her words, in that her narrative is composed entirely of the vocabulary she is allotted in Hamlet.

If it is true that fictional characters are literally no more than the words they are assigned in the text that gives them "life," Let Me Tell You illustrates that those words can go a long way. Through creative reshuffling and inconspicuous repetition Griffiths takes the fewer than 500 words Ophelia speaks (or sings) in Hamlet and fashions them into a convincing first-person account (with an interpolated play, several sonnets, and a soliloquy or two) of Ophelia's life before the events portrayed in the play, although in the words following those quoted on the back cover, she in effect acknowledges the difficulties of being liberated from the script she has until now always followed and that has set the terms of her existence:

. . .I was deceived to think I could not do this. I have the powers; I take them here. I have the right. I have the means. My words may be poor, but they will have to do.

What words do I have? Where do they come from? How is it that I speak?

Very rarely do Ophelia's words seem obviously contrived to fit the new circumstances of their utterance, and as the text unfolds Ophelia convinces us she has the right and the means to speak for herself and that the origin of her words is secondary to her often affecting repossession of them.

At the same time, one can never quite "lose" oneself in Ophelia's narrative. Its origin in the recycling of a precursor text, one that is no doubt well known to most who might read Let Me Tell You, must remain a manifest reality in the experience of reading the novel; it has very little claim on our attention, in fact, independent of its source in Hamlet and in Ophelia's role in the play. Admiration for the skill with which Griffiths rings changes on those 500 words is an unavoidable part of the reading experience. Indeed, the pleasure one takes in a work like Let Me Tell You is precisely the pleasure of witnessing in a particularly intent way the way a writer is using a structural device to bring character and event into existence.

In an interview with Mark Thwaite, Griffiths himself comments on the utility of his structural device: "If you keep to some form—some command, if you like—you come up with things you could never come up with by yourself." Griffiths' initial decision to write under the "constraint" imposed by sticking to the text of Hamlet--what he has "come up with" by himself--allows him, or forces him, to invest form with the duty to produce "content." This is what fiction writers who fancy themselves as having something "to say" are rarely able to do. For them, form is mostly an inconvenience, the bare minimal means to be enlisted in the grander act of saying something. Their work is thus formally unimaginative and, usually, thematically banal. In Let Me Tell You, Griffiths trusts that his form will effect its own kind of "saying." That it results in a character with emotional depth and a narrative that plausibly develops a life story about which Hamlet is otherwise silent only validates the wisdom of the author's commitment to that form.

Ultimately, Let Me Tell You seems to me one of those experimental fictions that straddles the line between narrative fiction and poetry, although by "poetry" we now mean only one of the modes that was included under that heading prior to the emergence of the novel as a separate literary form ("prose fiction"). Before then, "poetry" essentially included all modes of literary expression. If it is often the case that, as Brian Phillips has it, poets who write fiction often tend to exhibit a "powerful narrative impulse" that "refashions fiction with fiction’s own materials, not with transposed notes of poetry," writers of fiction who challenge what Phillips calls "narrative straightforwardness" often create works of "prose fiction" that remain more or less identifiably in "prose"--they are not "poetic" because they indulge in flights of figurative language similar to what is found in an older mode of lyric poetry--but that challenge the equation of "fiction" with narrative, refashioning fiction by aligning it with the structural imperatives of poetry but leaving the "lyrical" elements of verse aside. Such a move still puts more emphasis on language, as the reader must focus more squarely on the writer's effort to turn prose to account for purposes other than "telling a story," but it represents an approach to prose fiction that might re-establish it as a "poetic" genre alongside lyric poetry.

Near the end of Let Me Tell You, Ophelia, on the cusp of her fatal madness, laments to an absent Hamlet that "I cannot tell you what I most wish to tell you, for there are no words for what I would say." This is at the same time a playful reference to the conditions imposed on Ophelia's speech by the text itself and an honest statement of the unavoidable conditions imposed upon all poetic saying: the urge to express is quickly confronted with the actuality that all such expression will be incomplete, that the substance of what would be said is always escaping between the words. But, as Let Me Tell You demonstrates, what can be done with those words is sometimes almost sufficient compensation.

Rx

Fiction has always shown itself capable of absorbing other texts, other forms of discourse, into its own formal repertoire. Indeed, fiction as a literary mode began in attempts to mimic history (as in Fielding's novels) or as the fictional exchange of letters, as in the epistolary novels of Samuel Richardson. This ability to enlist various kinds of writing not themselves per se "literary" in the creation of literary form is part of what has allowed fiction to retain its vitality; there is no one proper "form" that a novel must take, despite the efforts of editors, creative writing programs, and many book reviewers to force it into a conventional mold combining plot, character, and setting in an identifiable formula.

Matthew Roberson's Impotent (FC2) is an example of this practice of assimilating other texts, although in this case Roberson perhaps takes it a little farther by fashioning what might be called a "formal correlative" whereby his novel's themes are mirrored in the form by which they are presented. Impotent is "about" our increasing dependence on pharmaceutical solutions to our various physical and psychological problems, and to that effect it incorporates the rhetoric to be found in drug labeling, drug advertising, and drug studies as devices in the serial narratives relating its characters' resort to prescription drugs. These devices become, in fact, the primary way we come to know the characters, as the kind of pharmaceutical intervention they require signals to us the sort of lives, usually stressful in ways they seem not to have anticipated, they find themselves maintaining.

One could say that Roberson has found a way to merge form and content, although this ends up, in my view, emphasizing the latter more than might be expected from a novel so unorthodox in its presentation. Impotent has no unifying protagonist but instead introduces a succession of characters related by their use of pharmacological helpers. (The book might plausibly called a collection of stories, but the repetitions of structure and theme encourage a holistic reading rather than one focused on individual episodes.) These characters are never given names other than identifying initials--M for male, S for spouse, C for child, etc.--and this almost inevitably accentuates the behavior in which they are engaged, behavior that both the several narratives and the text as a whole want to call into question. At best such a focus on "saying something" reduces Impotent to a kind of social satire that almost makes the novel's formal experiments seem superfluous.

A work like Impotent does, however, usefully remind us that the novel is an open-ended form limited only by writers' ability to reach outside established forms and claim modes of discourse seemingly beyond the compass of a "literary" treatment as adaptable to their purposes. Roberson's novel held my interest readily enough, and if the execution of its formal strategy ultimately seemed to me somewhat contrived, Impotent did expand my sense of what additional strategies writers of fiction might discover.

Not Living at the White-Hot Center

On the one hand, I don't really understand why a novel like K.B. Dixon's Andrew (A to Z) (Inkwater Press) isn't published by a larger, "mainstream" press rather than the small, essentially regional press that has published it. (Inkwater is located in Portland, Oregon, and, as far as I can tell, attention to the book has been confined mostly to the Pacific Northwest, including a review in the Oregonian, the only review the book has garnered.) It offers a reasonably engaging protagonist, who, as the novel's first-person narrator, possesses a generally lively writing style that at times can even be rather penetrating, and it is structured in a mildly unorthodox way--through alphabetically arranged entries that make the story of Andrew a kind of lexicographical guide to his life--that piques the reader's interest but surely doesn't really pose a threat to narrative coherence for most readers. It's at least as good as most of the "literary fiction" published by even the biggest New York publishers, and I have to conclude that the decisions by which this sort of fiction is published by these publishers are entirely arbitrary, at best guided by some wild guess about what might prove suitably commercial.

On the other hand, that one could imagine such a book as Andrew (A to Z) being brought out by a large commercial press suggests its most significant limitation as a putative work of "experimental" fiction, which its structured fragmentation clearly enough broadcasts it to be (and under which heading the Oregonian review introduces it). While the dictionary-entry form the novel assumes does fracture the "story" into seemingly arbitrary bits, ultimately the entries themselves still seem to have been chosen to illustrate certain pre-chosen features of Andrew's life and circumstances that eventually do add up to a fairly conventional account of a lightly-alienated, white collar employee and his elementary-school teacher wife. Fragmentation as a narrative strategy has by now been pretty thoroughly assimililated into the fiction writer's available array of structural devices, and unfortunately Andrew (A to Z) doesn't make especially provocative use of it. It presents us with the details of Andrew's experiences and obsessions in a shuffled, nonlinear fashion, but finally doesn't really encourage us to reflect very much either on the fragmented way in which we do in fact experience much of our lives or on the further variations that might be wrung out of fragmentation as a literary motif or narrative method.

Part of the reason why the alphabetic organization of this novel doesn't finally add up to much more than a modestly entertaining exercise in controlled discontinuity is perhaps that the underlying narrative is so familiar. Not much literally happens in Andrew (A to Z), for reasons Andrew himself ponders near the end of the novel: "My aversion to conflict and and the respectfulness with which I indulge that aversion makes me inherently undramatizable. There is no rising action in the story of me; nothing is set in motion by an exciting force because exciting forces are invariably neutralized by my incessant, quasi-pathological cautiousness."

This brief metafictional moment would seem to be the author's ironic comment on the fact that he has created a character who doubts "there is a place for me in fiction." Through the gradual accretion of evidence that Andrew is indeed largely "undramatizable," Dixon has dramatized Andrew"s very lack of dramatic interest. He is a modern American suburban man who doesn't quite understand how he got to be such, but who accepts his status more or less passively. He's a pretty keen observer of the confusions and limitations of his life, but he can't really bring himself to do anything in particular to change it. To me, this has become an increasingly commonplace kind of character in American fiction, and an increasingly uninteresting one, and Andrew (A to Z) does little to elevate such a character to a more consequential status as a "representative" figure in American life. The best he can do is provide the character with a quietly sardonic voice and the occasional perceptive remark. Which aren't nothing. Any novel containing passages like this is still worth reading:

It's entirely possible that there are too few intravenous drug users in my life--at least that's the feeling I get from Stephen who has a life full of them. According to him, if you are not personally acquainted with someone who's in prison for murder, then you are not leading a vital, authentic life. If your girlfriend hasn't burned you with a cigarette or stabbed you in the buttocks with a penknife, then you are not living at the white-hot center of it as you should be. But then, of course, Stephen is a romantic.

The Seagulls Inside My Head

Alain Robbe-Grillet begins his essay "From Realism to Reality" (in For a New Novel) with what must be a truism:

All writers believe they are realists. None ever calls himself abstract, illusionistic, chimerical, fantastic, falsitical. . .Realism is not a theory, defined without ambiguity, which would permit us to counter certain writers with certain others; it is, on the contrary, a flag under which the enormous majority--if not all--of today's novelists enlist. And no doubt we must believe them all, on this point. It is the real world which interests them; each one attempts as best as can to create "the real." (Translation by Richard Howard)

Robbe-Grillet believed himself to be a realist and his attempts at advancing a "new novel" an effort to preserve the possibility of realism in fiction against the insistence of some critics that the novel remain encased in its pre-modern form. "The discovery of reality will continue only if we abandon outworn forms," Robbe Grillet writes. "Unless we suppose that the world is henceforth entirely discovered (and, in that case, the wisest thing would be to stop writing altogether), we can only attempt to go farther. It is not a question of 'doing better,' but of advancing in ways as yet unknown, in which a new kind of writing becomes necessary."

This "new kind of writing" is necessary for realism's sake. Even if it is true that each succeeding generation of writers "has different ideas of reality," that "the classicists believed that it is classical, the romantics that it is romantic, the surrealists that it is surreal," the task of coping with "the objective modifications of reality" that have continued to develop at an ever increasing pace since the 19th century requires that the novel remain open to the kind of formal innovation that might--for the moment, at least--begin to "account for what is real today."

But Robbe-Grillet didn't think that the "realism" of novels consisted of merely reflecting the "real world" it encountered but that it actually worked to create reality:

The style of the novel does not seek to inform, as does the chronicle, the testimony offered in evidence, or the scientific report, it constitutes reality. It never knows what it is seeking, it is ignorant of what it has to say; it is invention, invention of the world and of man, constant invention and perpetual interrogation. All those--politicians and others--who ask of a book only stereotypes, and who fear above all the spirit of contestation, can only mistrust literature.

Robbe-Grillet comes a little closer to commenting on the kind of realism one finds in his own books when he reflects on a trip he once took to the Brittany coast:

On the way I told myself: here is a good opportunity to observe things 'from life' and to 'refresh my memory.' But from the first gull I saw, I understood my error: on the one hand, the gulls I now saw had only very confused relations with those I was describing in my book, and on the other hand it couldn't have mattered less to me whether they did or not. The only gulls that mattered to me at that moment were those which were inside my head. Probably they came there, one way or another, from the external world, and perhaps from Brittany; but they had been transformed, becoming at the same time somehow more real because they were now imaginary.

Those gulls inside the head are the gulls that make it into Robbe-Grillet's novels, even if they are described with a kind of obsessive exactitude that makes us believe they're a copy from "real life." Or, for example, we get this, the opening paragraph of Jealousy, which describes the south side of the house that will be the immediate setting for all of the novel:

Now the shadow of the column--the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof--divides the corresponding corner of the veranda into two equal parts. This verana is a wide, covered gallery surrounding the house on three sides. Since its width is the same for the central portion as for the sides, the line of shadow cast by the column extends precisely to the corner of the house; but it stops there, for only the veranda flagstones are reached by the sun, which is still too high in the sky. The wooden walls of the house--that is, its front and west gable-end--are still protected from the sun by the roof (common to the house proper and the terrace). So at this moment the shadow of the outer edge of the roof coincides exactly with the right angle formed by the terrace and the two vertical surfaces of the corner of the house.

Already we can see Robbe-Grillet beginning to "constitute" the reality of the novel's setting, which will extend to the banana plantation of which this house is the center, all described in the same painstaking, concentrated manner. And it is a particularly literal-minded kind of description: no fussy, unnecessary adjectives, no figurative flourishes to get in the way of a full-on apprehension of the house and its wooden walls, its veranda flagstones and "vertical surfaces." Robbe-Grillet's approach has at times been called "cinematic," but what could be less cinematic than this description of the banana trees:

In the second row, starting from the far left, there would be twenty-two trees (because of the alternate arrangement) in the case of a rectangular patch. There would also be twenty-two for a patch that was precisely trapezoidal, the reduction being scarely noticeable at such a short distance from its base. And, in fact, there are twenty-two trees there.

But the third row too has only twenty-two trees, instead of twenty three which the alternately-arranged rectangle would have. No additional difference is introduced, at this level, by the bulge in the lower edge. The same is true for the fourth row, which includes twenty-one boles, that is, one less than an even row of the imaginary rectangle.

It is generally assumed that film provides a more immediate and more distinct rendering of perceptible objects (at least visually), but passages like this demonstate that verbal depictions of such objects are, potentially at least, capable of a far greater range of effects, of bringing us much closer to the palpable qualities of things. In his essay, Robbe-Grillet writes of Kafka that "if there is one thing of which an unprejudiced realing convinces us it is the absolute reality of the things Kafka describes. . .Perhaps Kafka's staircases lead elsewhere, but they are there, and we look at them, step by step, following the detail of the banisters and the risers. Perhaps his gray walls hide something, but it is on them that the memory lingers, on their cracked whitewash, their crevices." The same is true of Robbe-Grillets descriptions; they force our attention on what is there. We remember (or should) the arrangements and textures of the plantation house, the symmetries of the banana rows.

Some might say that Robbe-Grillet's descriptions don't qualify as "realism" at all, since they appear to reject the principle of selectivity of detail and renounce the effort to enhance the real through figurative language, both of which are believed by such guardians of literary realism to be among its most crucial enabling conventions. But this is to confuse the practice of a certain kind of commercialized storytelling with realism, the latter of which probably becomes more genuine the farther away it gets from storytelling. It is to pin the concept of realism down to a few customary gestures that assume a stability of reference to "the real" and denies that this is a state of affairs to be discovered rather than presupposed. In abandoning these gestures, Robbe-Grillet's "experimental" fiction is actually an experiment in the further possibilities of realism, a realism that accepts, as Robbe-Grillet puts it in his essay's conclusion, that "everything is constantly changing" and that "there is always something new."

The realism of Jealousy is about as far away from modern "psychological realism," and especially the mode of narration James Wood defends as the "free indirect" method, as it could be. Our access to the characters and their environment remains entirely on the surface, our knowledge of what they are "thinking" confined entirely to what we can infer through their actions. This, is, of course, faithful to the way we do in fact experience reality, and the spurious notion that fiction is some magical way for writers to open up consciousness to our direct examination beyond what people say and do is duly dispensed with in Robbe-Grillet's novel. This is not to say that we don't ultimately gain access to a character's mental state, but this character is neither A. . . (not further named), the plantation wife, nor her possible lover, Franck (we're never entirely sure they are lovers), the ostensible protagonists of Jealousy. One could say that the true protagonist of the novel is the emotion named in the title, which we finally come to understand is expressed by the narrator, who is not the detached omniscient narrator we first assume him to be (or at least is also more than that) but the husband of A. . . and an observer of her suspicious behavior.

Thus we do almost literally inhabit the consciousness of this character, and we are determined in our experience of Jealousy's fictional world by the skillful manipulation of point of view--in this case a third-person/first-person hybrid. But, since we can't rest comfortably in the author's probing of the character's mind in a "free indirect" way, the effect is if anything to provoke us into re-reading the novel in order to direct our attention more carefully on the details and the actions through which, and only through which, can our awareness of the narrator's jealousy be raised. Jealousy encourages the reader to be an active participant in assembling whatever "meaning" we're to get from it; it doesn't allow us to settle passively for the "insight" afforded us by Wood's preferred strategy of "inflected" narration.

What this hybrid point of view allows Robbe-Grillet to do most thoroughly, however, is to create an intimately "realistic" world that both mirrors the narrator's own fixated absorption in detail--his "perpetual interrogation"-- and uses that absorption to "invent" scenes and circumstances of dense realistic detail. So dedicated is Robbe-Grillet to the invention of these scenes that he repeats many of them, enlisting his narrator in a repetition and return to specific details and events--the remains of a centipede killed while walking across a wall, workers fixing a bridge, etc.--as if making sure they have been surveyed for all of the attributes they can be made to reveal. The ultimate effect is of a scrupulously observed, enclosed world that is wholly imaginary, constituted through the writer's determination to invoke it in his words, and thus also wholly real.

The Names of Our Predecessors

In his essay "New Novel, New Man," from For a New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet defends the "New Novel" against some of the main criticisms directed at it (and at Robbe-Grillet's previous defenses of the practice). Among those criticisms was the charge that the New Novelists devalued the past, or, as Robbe-Grillet put it, that they "made a tabula rasa of the past." Robbe-Grillet replies that this charge can only itself proceed from an incomplete appreciation of the history of fiction:

Not only has the development been considerable since the middle of the nineteenth century, but it began immediately, in Balzac's own period. Did not Balzac already note the "confusion" in the descriptions of The Charterhouse of Parma? It is obvious that the Battle of Waterloo, as described by Stendhal, no longer belongs to the Balzacian order.

And, since then, the evolution has become increasingly evident: Flaubert, Dostoevski, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett. . .Far from making a tabula rasa of the past, we have most readily reached an agreement on the names of our predecessors; and our ambition is merely to continue them. Not to do better, which has no meaning, but to situate ourselves in their wake, in our own time.

Robbe-Grillet has himself, of course, now become one of those "names," one of the predecessors in whose wake writers inspired by his adventurousness might wish to "situate" themselves. But his account of the impulse behind experiment in fiction-the New Novel being a very prominent variety of experimental fiction in the post World War II era--is still compelling and goes some way toward clearing up a confusion about what motivates the best experimental writers.

Such writers do not consider themselves or their work either as cut off from the flow of literary history or as actively hostile to the acccomplishments of the past. Indeed, as Robbe-Grillet points out, they are likely to see the history of fiction as itself a history of innovation and the greatest writers as the greatest innovators. Experimental writers such as John Barth or Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover saw themselves as continuing the adventurous spirit embodied in their esteemed predecessors (Borges for Barth, for example, the surrealists for Barthelme) and Barth, for one, reached back for inspiration all the way to the beginnings of the novel for his first foray into "experimental" fiction, The Sot-Weed Factor. I'm certain that most younger experimental writers similarly look to the past for innovative touchstones, including the work of Barth, Barthelme, and Coover.

Those who don't risk producing fictions that seem merely eccentric, idiosyncratic, unattached to the historical tradition that itself represents a "development" of a form without "strict and definitive rules" and that proceeds through challenges to "order." Experimental fiction that seeks to be perceived as irrevocably "other" implicitly does regard the history of fiction as without notable predecessors and its writer does suggest he/she can "do better" than Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, et al. (or better than Balzac, for that matter). Absent this tradition, such doing better would, as Robbe-Grillet reminds us, have "no meaning."

Catch and Release

On the one hand, Peter Markus's Bob, or Man on Boat is a welcome departure from most debut novels in that it is not some form of bildungsroman, or more loosely a disguised memoir, a perfunctorily fictionalized version of the author's youthful experiences (more precisely, of the author's experience of youth). Nor is it, like most literary fiction, whether a first novel or the latest mid-career production, a mostly recognizable variation on conventional narrative or psychological realism.

Indeed, a reader expecting a conventional first novel will surely realize after only a few pages of Bob that this is not one, that, in terms of plot development, it is a novel that isn't going to go much beyond the delineation of the character and situation named in the title. The portrayal of Bob and his boat could perhaps be said to reach inward--although this is done through concentration and indirection, not through the tedium of the "free indirect" method--as well as to expand outward and around Bob in concentric circles of thinly-layered exposition, but it could hardly be said to ever really push forward into a plotted narrative. Just as Bob himself, a fisherman, generally sticks to one spot, where he knows the fishing is good, this novel remains anchored in its narrator's mostly static perceptions of Bob, with whose piecemeal revelations we will have to be content.

On the other hand, experimental fictions that try to dispense with story and character development in their conventional form run the risk of simply alienating the reader if they don't substitute for them some alternative strategy or technique that engages the reader's attention and to an extent, at least, satisfies the need for "entertainment," if only in the narrowest sense as "interest," most readers bring to works of fiction. Often this substitution takes place as the manipulation of language in odd or surprising ways, the use of "style" to create or even replace "form." Bob, or Man on Boat is a novel of this kind, but, unfortunately, in my view it doesn't really manage to play its language game with sufficient vigor or dexterity to redeem its otherwise commendable resolve to avoid the usual practices associated with fiction. It is, on the most immediate level, not much fun to read, and this problem originates not from the novel being "difficult"--it is in fact a very quick read--but from its rather unimaginative simplicity.

Although practically any brief excerpt from the book would do as illustration, this passage does exemplify both its stylistic approach and the limitations of that approach:

The fish, unlike the sun, listen to Bob.

When the fish hear Bob singing to them, singing to them through the darkness of the river, the fish can't help but take a bite: of Bob's son, of the bait that Bob is fishing with.

Sometimes, Bob takes his fishing hook and Bob digs out the eye of a fish to use this fish's eye for bait.

Most of the time, though, Bob baits his hooks with mud.

Bob is a mud man.

Some men who fish for fish fish with minnows or worms.

We call these fishing men worm men and minnow men.

We call this kind of bait live bait.

But live bait never lives long.

Live bait usually dies before it's eaten.

Which is why Bob fishes with mud.

The most obvious features of such writing are, of course, the arrangement of sentences into what seem at first to be something closer to lines of verse than to prose, the deliberate repetion of words--Bob, fish, bait, mud--the simplicity of word choice in general. It is somewhat reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, but where Stein's sentences break down syntactical sense, and in doing so paradoxically draw more attention to the sentence as sentence, as a unit of composition, Markus's approach simply breaks down the paragraph into its individual sentences without otherwise questioning their ultimate connections in an expository chain. Combined with its focus of attention--baiting a hook--such language is not only more prosaic than poetic, it winds up emphasizing the least compelling element of traditional prose fiction, namely exposition and its obsessive scene-setting, which in this novel threatens to become almost endless. It might be possible to focus on exposition as a substitute for narrative and still make such a work lively, but in this case the information we are gradually provided about Bob and his life as a fisherman just isn't of sufficient interest to keep the fiction afloat (so to speak).

In this context, the repetion of words comes off as labored, the unstudied syntax robotic and enervating, making even such a short novel something of a chore to read. In his review of Bob at The Brooklyn Rail, Joseph Salvatore claims of Markus's work that

The integrity inherent in Markus’s simple structure. . .is deceptively powerful, often leaving the reader in a hypnotic swoon. It is through the accumulation of so few words, their repetition and syntactic arrangement and re-arrangement that a kind of linguistic alchemy takes place. Inside the blast furnace of Markus’s prose, language gets smelted down and reconstituted. Words we assumed to have fixed meaning slowly begin to lose meaning, begin to take on new sound and new sense, and, finally, return to a meaning that has been enriched with new alloying elements, both uncanny and astounding.

All I can say is that although this might sound good in theory, in practice, at least as embodied in Bob, or Man on Boat, it doesn't quite work out. The arrangments and re-arrangements just get bogged down in their own aimlessness and the "alchemy" never happens. Words don't so much get "smelted down" as lost in a processing loop, and they don't really enrich themselves through repetition but simply become repetitive and don't accumulate as much as they cancel themselves out in a linguistic haze. Sometimes the postulate through which a work of experimental fiction is supposedly to be understood just can't overcome the ennui with which the work is actually experienced.

Unlike Che Elias's West Virginia, a novel which also strips fiction down to the effects of language and its rearrangements, and in which language truly does get "smelted down and reconstituted," Bob, or Man on Boat isn't going to transform anyone's expectations of what fiction might be like if taken beyond the conventional. The language of West Virginia roils in conflict with itself, setting off sparks of energy. For the most part, Bob's language just hangs there limply.

Novel No Longer

Richard Crary finds the term "novel" too confining, and wonders:

Why should contemporary prose works necessarily be treated as novels? Why do we insist that of course a given work is a novel, just not the kind of novel some readers expect? Why, indeed, should adventurous or exploratory or so-called experimental prose writing be subject to the same expectations as a novel? Why called a novel at all? (As always, I am ignoring the needs of the publishing industry.) Are Thomas Bernhard's works novels? Or might it be better to call them, simply, "prose works"? What about Blanchot's récit? Is Josipovici's Everything Passes a novel? David Markson's This Is Not A Novel was titled, so I understand, in response to a what one reviewer reportedly actually wrote in dismissing Reader's Block, his previous work. But what if we just saw the title as simply accurate and then worked from there?

There's no doubt that life could be made easier, for both writers and critics, if the identifying tag "novel" were confined to that plot- and character-heavy sort of narrative into which the novel evolved between 1850 and 1950 and which a majority of readers still steadfastly associate with the term. Devotees of "exploratory" prose would not have to contend, or would have to contend less, with objections that a particular work of experimental fiction is not "really" a novel, because it would indeed not be such and could perhaps be more honestly assessed according to criteria appropriate to what it is rather than what it is not. Many of the currently contentious critical debates about the purpose and proper form of the novel would presumably disappear, and those who insist it continue to be what it's always been and appeal to the widest possible audience would have the field to themselves.

Such a dispensation would have the added benefit of eliminating obtrusive discussions of "art" where the novel is concerned, since whatever art it would still be granted would be confined to minor variations on pre-established methods, and everyone still reading novels would be able to concentrate their attention on the "ideas" they supposedly express, the political efficacy they're claimed to have, the sociological observations they're said to make, or just the nice stories they're counted on to tell, all of which, as far as I can tell, are of much greater interest to readers of conventional novels than aesthetic values or formal ingenuity. "Style" might remain a relevant consideration, as long as it's used to identify especially pretty prose. Otherwise "art" can be safely relegated to the "experimental prose writing" Richard invokes, along with the latter's contrarian habit of representing experience in ways that aren't appropriately "realistic."

I confess I find this potential reinforcement of boundaries, and subsequent realignment of the literary sphere, initially attractive and possibly liberating. The reduction of the novel to its simplist form--or at least its most readily accessible--would allow adventurous writers to follow their creative bliss in whatever directions they wished (to the extent that they, too, are finally willing to "ignore the needs of the publishing industry") and critics to extend their horizons beyond the already known. Yet I think I would ulimately resist abandoning the classification "novel" as an umbrella term naming a still-evolving literary form. For one thing, a hardening of the boundary defining the novel would surely give whatever lies outside it a bracing freedom to explore new territory, but eventually it seems likely that either new boundaries would be erected around certain kinds of "prose works," boundaries that could prove just as restrictive, or that something like literary anarchy would ensue. Perhaps this anarchy would still be tolerable, depending on the quality of what some writers manage to produce, but such a state of affairs would make it more difficult to maintain a critical perspective on new writing, which might in turn make it more difficult for "prose writers" to gather an audience.

In addition, although I am clearly enough a partisan of experimental fiction, my appreciation of the experimental in literature is still pretty firmly rooted in literary history itself, and I am hesitant to conclude that those impulses that motivated writers to begin writing what we now call novels, and that has guided the development of fiction in general, are entirely spent. Fiction, at least in the modern literary tradition, began as an experiment itself, an offshoot of "narrative poetry" that began to test out the possibilities of extended narratives written in prose. Indeed, many of the early works of prose fiction, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Jacques the Fatalist, could be described as "prose works" seeking their own conventions rather than novels per se. The history of the novel, in my view, is the continued search for subjects, strategies, and techniques that would redeem the artistic potential both of the form and of prose itself as a literary medium. Many people seem to think that this search effectively ended in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when novelists discovered realism, enhanced by modernist experiments in "psychological realism," and thus added these approaches to the earlier emphasis on storytelling, but I think that such an arbitrary circumscription of the novel's further development is effectively a renunciation of the form's own history as an "exploratory" practice.

Perhaps, given both the adamacy with which the gatekeepers of the "novel" in its ossfied version insist on its right to the designation and the sheer abundance of alternatives to this version offered up over the last sixty years (including those written by the authors Richard mentions), we ought just to accept this renunciation and get on with writing and reading whatever fresh "prose works" continue to appear. Maybe this is the price to be paid for the novel's brief period of popularity as a mass entertainment before the arrival of movies and television to usurp that role: the "book business" expropriated the label "novel" as a marketing device and has continued to force all subsequent efforts at expanding the form back into its slim container. (Although in light of what seems to be the imminent implosion of this "industry," it may no longer be able to devote many resources to any but the most gaudily commercial novels at all.) The novel has effectively been severed from its place in the unfolding of literary history and tied instead to the imperatives of capitalism.

But would we have to discard as well the more elastic term "fiction" while we're giving up on "novel" as hopelessly constraining? "Fiction" doesn't just mean "something made up"; it's a signal that, as a prose composition that shouldn't be judged by its conformity to the prescripts of "reality," the work at hand is free to distort, embellish, pare away, redirect, transmute, or transcribe the "real" in whatever way provides the work its integrity, at whatever length, and in whatever style or form. Or at least it could mean this if we didn't insist that "fiction" is synonymous with "story." Much of the "experimental prose writing" of the past few decades has, in fact, moved fiction closer to the practices of poetry (back, as it were, to the origin of prose fiction in poetry), away from narrative toward various other arrangements and rearrangements of language. If this tendency were to result in some hybrid form somewhere between poetry and prose narrative, and were to inspire a new name to solidify its status, I myself wouldn't complain, but I'm content to stick to "fiction" and to challenging unnecessarily narrow conceptions of its scope.

The Room Indefinite

One hesitates to "review" a book like Che Elias's West Virginia (Six Gallery Press), since the conventions of reviewing require a focus on what a book is "about," where fiction is concerned on recapitulating the "story" (which, unfortunately, most newspaper book reviews emphasize most directly and at greatest length), as well as summing up the characters and situation motivating the story. Such reviews assume a shared, stable definition of "fiction" or "novel" in which these elements predominate, and to give an account of a particular novel using them is to position this novel--as well as the reviewer--in the recognizable, respectable space devoted to "literary fiction."

When confronted with a work that doesn't itself assume the stability of definition used by book reviewers, that is manifestly unconventional or "experimental," the temptation is to either label it so and let readers reach their own (usually unfavorable) conclusion about whether it's a book they'll want to read or to find a way to describe the work in such a way that it to some degree does incorporate the conventional elements--"the setting is indefinite and shifting, but nevertheless evokes a world of dreamlike dimensions," etc. I myself generally adopt the latter strategy when attempting a review of an unconventional work, although I don't so much try to make the work fit the existing categories as to explicate what it seems to me to be doing that effectively replaces or substitutues for those categories.

Even so, a descriptive review of this sort can still impose an appearance of normative coherence that the work doesn't really express, sometimes actively resists. This kind of review also risks misleading the reader, who might give the book a chance, hoping to find enough of the conventional pleasures to make it worthwhile in those terms only to find it remains alien and "difficult." Such a review does a disservice both to the reader and to the work in question, the latter of which ought somehow to be given the opportunity to be approached on its own terms. The effort to "dumb down" fiction so that it appeals to the widest possible audience is in general misguided and counterproductive, and even an unwitting distortion of a challenging novel's discernible features also does the cause of experimental fiction no favors at all, if anything drives the "ordinary" reader even farther away.

Thus I will not attempt to recover West Virginia for the casual reader who knows he/she will not find enjoyable a novel--albeit a relatively brief one--whose prose style might be captured in a passage such as this:

Now I can only listen to the smile that killed me before, to the time that ran away and the days where they say they've all left me. And the time now, the room indefinite, and the room now, the place where you were next to me, and the room said, well, you got some things you can think of being the only ones that exist, and the days being the only men you can say were human. And the people, down to the point in Wheeling, they will all say yes, we're those people, and the men, too, the ones who killed us, and the ones who only held one thing against us in Wheeling, there was just a time when we knew they were all through. And I had to walk down steps in Wheeling too, think I crossed halls and fields as well, guess these are the worst people I know, guess that I should get used to them.

I enjoyed West Virginia--in fact, read it twice--but I can't finally say what the book is "about," although the above-quoted passage does invoke several of the motifs and images that recur throughout the text: a room, "the people," an incident in Wheeling, which may have involved a rape, a killing, child abuse, a fire. There are several named characters, Andy Reed, Amber Reed (the latter of whom may have betrayed the former), Lynda Cleary, but they are hardly "characters" of the sort most readers expect to find in novels. They are essentially the locus around which the motifs and images swirl in a montage of repetition and variation. The effect is often hypnotic and sometimes dramatic--a revelation of sorts seems on the verge of materializing only to become lost again in the swirl--and the reader willing to suspend expectations of character continuity, of narrative "arc" and resolution, of style as a source of information, with the occasional rhetorical flourish, might well find the pull of language itself an adequate subsitute for the narrative devices most writers still cling to, as did I.

But I don't think many readers will be willing to suspend these expectations, especially not as radically as a work like West Virginia solicits us to do. Those who consider the usual narrative devices to be the essence of fiction would surely put the book aside in confusion after a page or two. To some extent one might say that West Virginia is a "novel" that takes "psychological realism" to its most insular extreme: We are trapped inside the memories and/or perceptions of the narrator, who is unable to exteriorize these perceptions into what most readers of fiction would consider appropriate discourse. If you want access to "mind" in its rawest precincts, this is it. I don't think too many readers, even readers ostensibly committed to realism, would find much solace in this, either. Nor would it suffice to call this text "poetry" rather than fiction (a hybrid, perhaps), as most readers already avoid poetry because it's "just language," arranged in ways these readers don't "get." To urge urge such readers to try West Virginia because it's in some deep sense "poetic" might get us over the obstacle posed by "difficulty" in fiction but doesn't get us over the remaining obstacle that poses the poetic as difficult in the first place.

Thus, if you think you might like a book that requires a different kind of reading from you, reading that asks you to avoid the paths of comprehension you've always trod, by all means read West Virginia. If you're comfortable on those paths, and think a book like this would just get you lost, you probably should avoid it.

Localized

Many of the posts on this blog are concerned with what is loosely called "experimental" fiction. Some people object to this term, finding it either overly general or awkwardly clinical, conjuring up images of the novelist in a lab coat. I find the term problematic only in that I think all fiction should be experimental: no fiction writer should rest satisfied that prose fiction has settled into its final and most appropriate form such that only reiterations of the form with fresh "content" is needed. However, to the extent that "experimental fiction" denotes the effort explicitly to push at the limits previous practice has seemingly imposed on the possibilities of fiction as a literary form, I am comfortable enough with the label and see no reason to abandon it altogether.

At the same time, "experimental" does cover a very broad range of strategies and effects, and some distinctions between different kinds of literary experiment and between works manifesting experiment to different degrees could certainly be made. Just to consider "experiment" in fiction at the most general level of adherence to convention--convention understood as a definable feature that has come to make fiction recognizable to most readers as fiction--it is possible to distinguish between works that set out to transform our conceptions of the nature of fiction in toto, and those that focus in a more limited way on producing innovative changes on specific conventions. The former might be called "transgressive" experiments that overrun the extant boundaries observed by most readers, critics, and other writers, while the latter might be regarded as "local" experiments that challenge "normal" practice but do so from within the boundary that otherwise marks off the still-familiar from the disconcertingly new.

Novels like Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable or Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew would be good examples of the former, while Jeffrey DeShell's The Trouble With Being Born (FC2) is more appropriately considered as a local experiment. Readers of The Trouble With Being Born would probably find it accessible enough, a family chronicle that traces the lives of a husband and wife from their youth to their extreme old age. Its autobiographical roots are explicitly exposed, as the family is the DeShell family and the couple's only child is named Jeff, but the book's most provocative feature is undoubtedly the way in which the couple's story is related. The husband and wife tell their own stories in alternating first-person narratives, but while Mrs. DeShell's story is presented in reverse order, beginning with her affliction by dementia in old age and proceeding backwards into her childhood, Mr. DeShell's story proceeds in the opposite direction, from childhood to lonely old age. The two stories meet at numerous junctures, and the overall effect is to provide a convincing account of a mostly dysfunctional marriage.

The novel's twinned first-person narration spares us the kind of tedious psychologizing to which we would potentially be subjected through the use of a third-person narrator "going inside" the characters's heads in order to understand them, but it does pose a problem shared by other first-person narratives that do not make clear their source in a plausible narrative situation--the narrator committing his/her story to the page directly (albeit in any number of possible forms of notation), or speaking it directly to some identifiable audience. Both Mr. and Mrs. DeShell tell their stories in seemingly disembodied voices that represent neither their attempts to reckon directly through writing with the direction their lives have taken nor the recitation of their experiences before at least a potential audience. It is understandable that the author wished to explore these characters' sense of themselves through ventriloquizing their voices, but such an unmotivated mode of narration occasionally calls attention to itself in a way DeShell probably doesn't intend:

My fiftieth birthday. I don't look fifty. I'm driving Jewell's Firebird with her to meet Tommy the Rock at Mr. Z's, a nightclub in the Springs. Tommy the Rock will be sure to have some broads with him. Too bad Dominic is sick. I told Frances that I was going down to the Knights of Columbus, but I don't think she believed me. Screw her. She doesn't know fun. If she hadn't gotten so fat, maybe I'd be with her more often. She can watch the fireworks at home with Jeff. The two of them deserve each other. My wedding ring is in my pocket.

In a passage like this, DeShell is forced to use his narrator to present information so transparently and so implausibly (no one really says such things to oneself) that narrative continuity is broken. Since it seems to me that DeShell is ultimately attempting to maintain the illusion of realism in character and narrative voice, and is not indulging in postmodern tricks by calling attention to narrative artifice, this storytelling strategy can make suspension of disbelief difficult to grant.

Perhaps it was necessary to employ this style of narration in order to allow the characters' voices their necessary role both in the unfolding of their separate stories and in the larger story those stories together create. Both perspectives must be provided. And despite the awkwardness occasioned by the choice of point of view (and by the consistency of its application), the novel's aesthetic strategy essentially does succeed in making The Trouble With Being Born a compelling read and in chronicling the fortunes of what is probably an all-too-common American family. It succeeds in turning our notions of chronology and contiguity against themselves to create a locally satisfying narrative experiment, even if in the final analysis narrative itself as the central focus of interest in fiction is not challenged and the protocols of point of view are actually reinforced. Such a book won't revolutionize the art of fiction, but its does perhaps help remind readers that the requirements for creating this art are not fixed in place.

The Many Faces of Odysseus

Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Starcherone Books) would seemingly qualify as a "novel" only if we define the form in the barest possible terms: a lengthy composition in prose. Puporting to be a decoded translation of a series of "extra" episodes of The Odyssey (decoded because, according to the translator, who provides an introduction to the book that has now been made of them, they have existed as an encrypted manuscript the means of decrypting which has only recently been discovered), it bears no resemblance to the sort of unified narrative most readers expect to find in a novel. There is no plot other than the preexisting plot of the Odyssey, on which the "lost books" perform multiple variations. Similarly, while Odysseus is presumably the protagonist (if it isn't the "translator"), many different versions of Odysseus, assuming many different roles, are presented in the 46 episodes comprising The Lost Books. The stories are told from many different points of view, both first-person and third-person (one of the most affecting of the tales is told by the Cyclops, lamenting his blindness at the hands of Odysseus (and for whom he expresses great hatred)), and while one might read the tales simply as a collection of stories, this would rob them of the coherence they ultimately attain as a set of imaginative supplements to the Odyssey narrative--taken together, they form a kind of anti-Odyssey, an implicit commentary on the Homeric version of the story achieved by highlighting its elisions and sounding out its interstices.

Such a strategy does require some familiarity on the reader's part with the Odyssey itself, since the effects created by this sort of rewriting and rearranging to an extent do depend on our recognition that an episode from Homer's text has been recast--Odysseus returns to Ithaca to find his people "all astonishment and delight" and Penelope dead, Achilles abandons the Green encampment to do good works in the world, perhaps to spend "a year in contemplation in the shadow of a tree"--or a character or episode has been enhanced or freshly emphasized. While it is certainly possible that the reader only minimally acquainted with both The Iliad and The Odyssey would still find Mason's alternative versions diverting enough, the humor and the wit embodied in Mason's counter-narratives, as well as the cleverness of their construction, will surely strike the Odyssey-literate with more force and efficacy than those who know Homer's epic only in its barest outlines, if at all. By no means is The Lost Books of the Odyssey a book to be enjoyed only by classicists, but it helps to be a reader with an interest in literature, and The Odyssey's role in its history, that overshadows whatever interest most readers of novels profess to have in encountering "real life" in fiction.

Despite these potential obstacles to a broad audience for a book like The Lost Books of the Odyssey, it is, in my opinion, nevertheless a work of "experimental" fiction that many readers would find enjoyable if they were to give it a chance. Not only are many of the invented episodes entertaining in their own right, but gradually one comes to anticipate what new twist on the Odysseus story Mason will offer, in a way that is almost analogous to the pleasurable anticipation readers feel when looking forward to the next turn of plot in a conventional narrative. Equally rewarding is the opportunity to reflect further on the Homeric themes of war, honor, leadership, and sacrifice, which, if anything, are accentuated even more intensely (if at times ironically) through the liberties taken with the story of the Trojan War (e.g., the chapter narrated by Odysseus that begins, "I have often wondered whether all men are cowards like I am") and through the parallels that might be drawn between this re-told Odyssey and our own ongoing, ill-conceived war. The Borgesian frame provided by the translator's introduction and an appendix relating the history of the lost books contributes an additional tongue-in-cheek element that completes the novel's masquerade as a feat of "scholarship."

For me, the most successful works of experimental fiction always "entertain," even when they reject or subvert the usual devices conventionally considered the source of fiction's ability to entertain--the devices that create "compelling characters," dramatic narratives, "vivid" settings, etc. (Gilbert Sorrentino's novels provide a good example of this ability to entertain while dispensing with the standard accoutrements of entertainment.) In experimental fiction of the postmodern kind, this is frequently accomplished through comedy and satire. In the case of The Lost Books of the Odyssey it is achieved through what might simply be called ingenuity, along with a certain amount of chutzpah. This may or may not be an approach all readers can appreciate, but I found this novel a pleasure to read nevertheless, and I highly recommend it.

Incorporating the Old

It is sometimes mistakenly assumed that "experimental" writers (and the critics who champion them) have little regard for the kind of fiction that preceded them, that they simply deny the continued aesthetic value of what has come before. But I think most experimental or unconventional writers have a relationship to the past that is captured by these words from John Dewey in Art as Experience:

When the old has not been incorporated, the outcome is merely eccentricity. But great original artists take a tradition into themselves. They have not shunned it but digested it. Then the very conflict set up between it and what is new in themselves and in their environment creates the tension that demands a new mode of expression.

Writers like William Gass or John Barth or Robert Coover have always been at pains to make clear they consider their own work to be extensions of past practice, part of the very tradition their fiction otherwise seems to be challenging. Barth especially found inspiration for his "postmodern" work in such 18th century forms as the picaresque and epistolary novel, as well as in Greek and Arabic literature, while Gass's essays frequently pay tribute to writers of the past. By "digesting" literary history, these writers both nourish their own talents by heightening the "conflict set up between [tradition] and what is new in themselves," thereby discovering "a new mode of expression," and help to bring a usable literary past into the present. This is not so much Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" as it is a necessary sounding of literary tradition in order to find one's own proper place within it.

Certainly there are "eccentric" writers whose work seems merely strange, even incomprehensible, because an enabling context--to what convention is this device responding, to meet what known goal has that strategy been used--is missing. Such works lack the "tension" Dewey speaks of, and the effort to read them is mostly frustrating rather than creatively challenging. But I would guess that most writers of innovative fiction set out to create fiction as good as that which they've admired as readers. To do so requires more than imitation. It requires finding the means adequate to "a new mode of expression" that perhaps will measure up to those already to be found in the great works of the past. Ultimately it requires an effort equal to that Dewey ascribes to the "great innovators in modern painting," who "were more assiduous students of the pictures of the past than were the imitators who set the contemporary fashion."

Dead Systems

In his essay "On Several Obsolete Notions," Alain Robbe-Grillet describes the novel in its "classic" phase:

All the technical elements of the narrative--systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulse of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.--everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem. The style of the novel could be innocent.

He continues:

But then, with Flaubert, everything begins to vacillate. A hundred years later the whole system is no more than a memory, and it is to that memory, to that dead memory, that some seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered. . . .

It is tempting to say that Robbe-Grillet's account of the 19th century novel and the shadow it cast on subsequent novelists still seems relevant, fifty years later, and that many readers still think of the "innocent" narrative as the novel's natural form, from which any variation or experiment in form is merely a temporary departure. However, an honest consideration of Robbe-Grillet's bill of particulars would have to conclude that fiction over the course of the 20th century did in fact move beyond the model Robbe-Grillet associates with Balzac and other early novelists.

While much current fiction does continue to employ third-person narration--usually the "free indirect" variant through which a character's thoughts, recollections, and emotions provide a perceptual matrix but are not directly stated by the character--first-person narratives are probably more prevalent than ever before, as are experiments in shifting, alternate, and multiple points of view. Similarly, stories related in the present tense have become so common that what was once a notable divergence from the norm is probably no longer noticed by most readers. And while most novels still rely on "plot," their plots are by no means always "linear," such chronological development as they possess often enough supplied by the reader after piecing together the fragments of narrative presented without much immediate regard for chronological continuity. It could perhaps be argued that too many novels do still imply a "decipherable universe"--decipherable insofar as it can be adequately rendered through the protocols of realism--but most literary fiction is not so tied to a 19th century worldview as to portray human experience as "stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal."

Indeed, to the extent that contemporary life seems to many of us discontinuous and indefinite, the modernist-derived strategies emphasizing subjectivity and fragmentation seem justified in the name of realism itself. And to this extent, Robbe-Grillet has been proven correct when in the same essay he predicts that this sort of modernist experimentation (with which he more or less associated his own fiction) will become "assimilated," viewed by critics still attuned only to the past as the most recent golden age of storytelling. Thus, esteemed critics such as James Wood point us back to Henry James or Virginia Woolf as writers who set a standard of inner-directed realism, a realism of the mind and its subjective perceptions rather than a realism of the material world presented as a collection of facts. Wood is certainly not alone in holding up the psychological novel as the apogee of the novel as a literary form. The notion that in fiction, and only in fiction, we can "get inside" a character, can "feel" what it's like to negotiate the world from a perspective other than our own, is very widespread. But, I would argue, this is because one part of the modernist project, the extension of realism into "psychological realism," has been successful, while that part setting a prececent for aesthetic innovation ("make it new") as a measure of artistic achievement has not been embraced as firmly by either writers or critics. The set of accepted conventions for the writing of fiction has been advanced from about 1825 to about 1925, but those voices that "seek with all their might to keep the novel fettered" to a "dead system" can still be heard, even if that "system" has incorporated some of the strategies for which Robbe-Grillet himself was an advocate.

Although "innocent" novels are still being written (particularly within some forms of genre fiction), very few serious writers have failed to notice fiction's loss of innocence. But the expansion of techniques available to the modern writer has developed into its own kind of "systematic" practice that can be just as stubborn an obstacle to the development of a "new novel" as the traditonal story form Robbe-Grillet wanted to clear away. It is probably inevitable that strategies and approaches once regarded as mold-breaking will eventually become conventional, established techniques for the novelist to adopt when they suit his/her need. But this only makes it more important that writers like Robbe-Grillet or Donald Barthelme or Gilbert Sorrentino emerge to point out that such techniques have become hidebound and to offer fresh alternatives.

The Books of the Future

Regardless of whether his own novels will stand up as important instances of "a new departure," Alain Robbe-Grillet thoroughly understood what it would take for the novel to survive as a credible art form:

There is no question. . .of establishing a theory, a pre-existing mold into which to pour the books of the future. Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone. Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardize them, breaking them, even exploding them. Far from respecting certain immutable forms, each new book tends to constitute the laws of its functioning at the same time that it produces their destruction. Once the work is completed, the writer's critical reflection will serve him further to gain a perspective in regard to it, immediately nourishing new explorations, a new departure. ("The Use of Theory," in For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard)

So much for the notion that "The ultimate test of any writer may be taking on the most traditional of genres. . .and pouring new wine into old skins." This may be the "test" for a certain kind of commercially-minded writer, the "professional author," but as Robbe-Grillet explains, the writer who truly takes his/her form seriously is willing not only to reject the "old skins" but also to discard the "new wine" once it has been made. Continuing to use the same "recipe" only shuts down the process of "continual reflection" on the possibilities of fiction needed to keep it vital. What has already been done--by the writer, by previous writers--however much it might continue to please readers, for the writer serves ultimately as the motivation for "new explorations," without which the novel will devolve into mere product and survive only as an historical curiosity. "The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date," writes Robbe-Grillet elsewhere in this essay, "knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future."

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.

Everyone Has Done It

Readers who would expect from Laura Mullen's Murmur (Futurepoem Books) a "plot" of the sort we usually expect from a work designated a "novel" (even if the plot is deliberately fragmented or only cursorily developed) would certainly be considerably disappointed. What we get instead is a rudimentary situation--a dead woman is found on a beach--that is either real or is the beginning of the plot of a book a woman is reading and that is repeated, in different iterations, over and over.

Readers who would expect well-developed "characters" (as Gilbert Sorrentino would have it, characters who "jump off the page") would also be sorely disappointed. The woman, a detective, potential killers appear and re-appear, changing places with one another so that, as one of the blurbs on the jacket flap describes it, we get "all possible events, all murderers and all murdered, so that, at any point in the narrative, everything has happened and everyone has done it." There are voices, drifting in and out, but no characters.

Thus the reader who would seek a stable point of view, from which we can coherently make sense of the "action," would also be frustrated, especially since the book is offered to us as, ostensibly, a crime novel, or a pastiche of one. Murmur doesn't lead us, as in most detective novels, on an epistemological journey culiminating in knowledge (who done it) but instead renders up a world of epistemological chaos, by which all our ways of knowing are mocked and travestied. Still, we keep reading (or at least I did), not to find out who did what but to find out what new obstacle to our desire for such knowledge (which has us "reading for the plot" and ignoring the means by which it is presented to us) the author will introduce. (Our tendency to read in this way is further mocked at the level of sentence and paragraph; many sentences break off at the margin, left unfinished, the connection to the line that follows short-circuited so that we must bear down even harder and search for the missing sense.)

In short, readers who would expect Murmur to be a recognizable kind of novel in any way other than the most elemental--its 151 pages seem to be related to one another, and we are encouraged through style and imagery to take it as a coherent whole--will probably not enjoy it. It seems to me the very embodiment of John Hawkes's dictum that "the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure [is] really all that remain[s]" If anything, Mullen's book is even more combative against the conventional strategies of fiction, more reliant on "totality of vision," than Hawkes's, even, perhaps, more than Beckett's. I liked it, and intend to read it again.

NOTE In this essay, Jennifer K. Dick discusses Murmur more as a long poem than as a novel.