The Reading Experience

Satisfactions

In his review of Stephen Marche's Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (Riverhead Books), Brian Evenson asserts that too many of the selections in the fictionalized anthology that gives this book its form have "too few of the satisfactions we’ve come to expect from fiction."

On the one hand, Marche would probably be disappointed that this reviewer at least found his book to some degree unsatisfying, but on the other, that this dissatisfaction comes from finding too few of the pleasures "we've come to expect from fiction" doesn't necessarily mean the book has failed. Indeed, if Shining at the Bottom of the Sea provoked the reader into reflecting on the "safisfactions" fiction ought to provide, it probably could be called successful in fulfilling one of the implicit goals of experimental fiction: to remind readers there is no one form fiction has to take, that what is "expected" from fiction isn't necessarily what it always needs to provide.

Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is, it seems to me, an experimental novel in the purest sense of the term. It bypasses almost entirely the conventional elements of the novel--plot, character, point of view--and offers in their place an historical narrative of sorts that unfolds between the lines of the anthologized documents substituting for the "expected" narrative of incident, character revelation, etc. Edited by "Stephan Marche," the documents are primarily a selection of short fictions representing the literary heritage of "Sanjania," a fictional North Atlantic island whose original inhabitants were brought there on Spanish slave ships but which came to be a British colony. The stories are arranged chronologically, thus giving us both a survey of Sanjanian literary history and an exploration of Sanjanian history and culture more broadly (at least as the latter can be inferred through the stories--not necessarily a straightforward process, since they are, after all, fictions and not historical narratives per se.) There is also a section at the end of the volume devoted to "Criticism," which is less literary criticism in the strict sense than a series of nonfiction pieces, including an interview with a living Sanjanian writer, that act to tie together the stories by focusing on important themes and historical motifs. One of the conventional elements of fiction that remains in effect is setting, and it is the way in which Sanjania itself acts as the focus of attention, becomes a kind of character in itself, that leads me to call Shining at the Bottom of the Sea a novel. It's a novel that asks us to expand existing definitions of what a novel might be.

Since this is literally a text highlighting writing as writing, it would have to be categorized as "metafiction," but one of the accomplishments of this book is the way in which it demonstrates how metafiction can be not a symptom of literary narcissism but a perfectly serviceable means to other literary ends. In this case, a text about writing also turns out to be a text about something else, a something else that probably couldn't be evoked in some other manner without sacrificing its unity of effect and a certain kind of efficiency. A sprawling saga about the colonial and post-colonial history of Sanjania is not the sort of thing I would rush to read, but the metafictional ingenuity of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea does appeal; in fact, I am more likely to note the postcoloniast themes inherent in the story of Sanjania as they emerge through the juxtapositions of story and the gradual accumulations of reference than through the more obvious effects of "drama." In my view, readers are more likely to return to a text like Shining at the Bottom of the Sea to try to piece together even more coherently the underlying story of Sanjania and Western colonialism, to align the selections that make up this faux-anthology into an even more comprehensible whole. It's a novel that invites re-reading in a way more conventional narratives do not.

Which does not mean that Evenson is entirely incorrect in suggesting that not all of the individual entries in Marche's anthology-as-novel are equally interesting. Some make for better reading than others. Some play a stronger role in depicting the history of Sanjania than others. In his review of the book at the Toronto Star, Philip Marchand calls it a "pastiche" and comments that in such a work "The reader's assumption is always that the author of a poem or story is doing his best to make it a good poem or story – but this assumption falters when the story or poem is put inside of quotation marks, as it were," asking further: "If the reader finds the story or poem dull, is it because the (real) author has failed or because the reader has missed some part of the joke?" I'm not sure it's necessary we think the author was "doing his best" to make each selection an equally "good poem or story." The contents of the anthology need to reflect the development of Sanjanian literature, but this doesn't mean every story has to be "good" in some universally acceptable sense of the term. It isn't a "joke" if the writer is trying to evoke a particular style that doesn't exactly fulfill expectations of "good" writing. It's possible to achieve "good" writing," to write well, by summoning up a prose style with its own limitations, even that is deliberately wretched (see many of the novels of Gilbert Sorrentino).

Still, some readers might find parts of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea slow-going, not necessarily because they're inattentive readers but because of hazards inherent to the kind of work this is. It may be that Marche has pulled this experiment off about as well as it can be done, or someone inspired by Marche's example might try something similar and avoid its longeurs. (And I don't want to exaggerate their effect. Most of the conjured-up stories are well-done, and the occasional dense patch doesn't obscure the overall realization of the novel's design.) But I would hope that all readers would finally judge it using criteria that are fair to the sort of novel it is rather than those appropriate to other novels using conventions "we’ve come to expect from fiction" that this novel rejects.

A Retroactive Historical Trajectory

It's good that Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss print at the end of the book an interview with themselves about Interfictions, an "anthology of interstitial writing" they've edited and published through the Interstitial Arts Foundation. Otherwise I, for one, would have finished the book, including its nominal "Introduction," without having much of an idea what either "interfiction" or "interstitial" are supposed to mean.

Heinz Insu Fenkl's intoduction tells us that a book of his was published as a novel, even though it was really a memoir. Later, a publisher wanted to "repackage" the book as a memoir. Presumably, then, the book is neither a novel nor a memoir, but something "in-between," even though Fenkl's account makes it perfectly clear that it is a memoir, its "tropes, its collaging of time and character" notwithstanding. Using what Fenk thinks of as "novelistic" devices not make the book a novel. Not wishing to have it understood as a memoir does not make it other than a memoir.

After this thoroughly confusing initial illustration (confusing in terms of what an "interfiction" might be), Fenkl goes on to tell us in jargon-clogged prose such things as "The liminal state in a rite of passage precedes the final phase, which is reintegration, but an interstitial work does not require reintegration--it already has its own being in a willfully transgressive or noncategorical way"; "Interstitial works have a special relationship with the reader because they have a higher degree of indeterminancy (or one could say a greater range of potentialities) than a typical work"; "Once it manifests itself, regardless of the conditions of its creation, the interstitial work has the potential to create a retroactive historical trajectory"; "An interstitial work provides a wider range of possibilities for the reader's engagement and transformation. It is more faceted than a typical literary work, though it also operates under its own internal logic."

This is all well and good, but I finished Fenkl's essay still wondering what an "interfiction" is. How does it differ from other literary works that also manifest a high degree of "indeterminancy" but no one ever thought to call "interstitial."? (In my opinion, all great works of literature are inderminate in this way. It's what makes them literature in the first place. And Fenkl's invocation of "a retroactive historical trajectory," by which literary works of the past are transformed by new works, seems to me just a restatement of T.S. Eliot's notion that "The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them," which applies to all new works, interstitial or otherwise.) Does it merely have to be "transgressive" of genre boundaries? Where do we mark those boundaries, anyway? And what exactly is a "typical literary work"? I always get the sense that when intense partisans of genre fiction, SF especially, get wound up about "literary fiction" and its discontents, they usually associate such fiction with "realism," against which all genre fiction transgresses in one way or another. But is Finnegans Wake realism? The Unnameable? Catch-22? Infinite Jest? If not, do they also qualify as interstitial or as interfictions? Are or they just not "typical" literary fiction? (In which case the whole notion of "transgression" becomes just a convenient buzz word. It only applies to the most rigidly conventional or the most really boring literary fiction.)

Sherman and Goss clear things up a little bit in their interview. "An interstitial story does not hew closely to any one set of recognizable genre conventions," says Sherman. This makes it sound like an "interfiction" blurs the lines between genres, although from my reading of the stories collected in the book it seems that most of them mostly revolve around a fantasy/science fiction/horror axis that, as an only occasional reader of these genres, I often have trouble seeing as radically opposed forms that need bridging or boundary-smashing. But then Sherman says of one of the stories ("Climbing Redemption Mountain," a kind of cross-breeding of John Bunyan and Erskine Caldwell) that "If I tried to read it as realism, I ran up against the fact that the writer had made up this world out of whole cloth. If I tried to read it as a fantasy, I ran up against the story's lack of recognizable genre markers." This suggests that the real "boundary" the book wants to question is again that between "realism" (literary fiction) and genre fiction with its identifiable "markers."

Reading the book as a collection of stories that are "willfully transgressive in a noncategorical way" did me no good at all. Notwithstanding that most of them were "transgressive," when at all, in rather tepid and formally uninteresting ways, I simply was unable to understand what they shared in common that made them "interfictions." The editors' narrowing of focus to the contest between "realism" and genre fiction did allow me to reexamine the stories in this more concentrated light. (Although not all of them. Apparently some of them are "interstitial" because they portray characters who feel "in-between" or because their authors themselves feel this way, as revealed in the authors's comments appended to each story.) But ultimately I am still puzzled by Sherman's explanation of how it is that interstitial ficion avoids "any one set of recognizable genre conventions." She continues:

An interstitial story does interesting things with narrative and style. An interstitial story takes artistic chances. . .[E]very interstitial story defines itself as unlike any other. . .The best interstitial work. . .demands that you read it on its own terms, but it also gives you the tools to do so.

I am hard-pressed to understand how these characteristics of "interfiction" distinguish it from other, non-genre, "experimental" fiction that also "does interesting things with narrative and style" and "takes artistic chances." Experimental fiction (which ultimately I would have to say is a part of "literary fiction," representing its vanguard in exploring the edges of the literary) precisely "demands that you read it on its own terms" rather than according to pre-established conventions. If interfictions are just versions of experimental fiction, why coin this additional term to describe them? If there is some significant difference between interstitial and experimental fiction, something that has to do with genre, why not be more specific and delineate exactly what that is rather than fall back on the usual language about taking artistic chances, etc.? Or is the purported conflict between realism and genre really meant to blur the fact that plenty of writers, writers who are otherwise thought of as "literary," have already deconstructed this oppositon and created work demanding "you read it on its own terms"?

On the other hand, if the stories in this anthology were to be presented as simply "experimental," without the accompanying claims that they alone challenge the "typical literary work," it's not likely they could stand up to scrutiny. Adrienne Martini's review of the book in the Baltimore City Paper asserts that the first story, Christopher Barzak's "What We Know About the Lost Families of -------- House," "feels wholly unique, as if it is rewriting our expectations about what kind of story it is even as we're reading it," but it's really just a haunted-house variation on Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." The second story, Leslie What's "Post Hoc," about a woman who tries to mail herself to her estranged boyfriend, strikes me as standard-issue surrealism, with perhaps a chick-lit chaser. (I guess this might itself be "interstitial," but it's not very interesting.) "Climbing Redemption Mountain" doesn't really go anywhere with its blending of allegory and rural Gothic except to a mountaintop rendezvous with banality.

Of the rest of the stories, Matthew Cheney's "A Map of the Everywhere" is pleasantly odd and Colin Greenland's "Timothy" has an amusing premise (a woman's cat is transformed into a man) that unfortunately doesn't go anywhere. Most of the rest are forgettable exercises conducted on what seem (to me) familiar science fiction/fantasy terrain. Some of them, such as Anna Tambour's "The Shoe in SHOES' Window" and Catherynne M. Valente's "A Dirge for Prester John" are essentially unreadable, full of pretentious declamations substituting for narrative: "Truly, where chaos reigns, even at night, nonsense and evasion shine where people look for straightforwardness, but where they look for inspiration, something beyond the realm of daily existence, they are then shown only things, and who can feed his soul with that?" Too many of the stories, in fact, are like this, straining after Meaning where some "merely literary" formal and stylistic pleasures would go a long way toward deflating the pomposity.

Karen Jordan Allen's "Alternate Anxieties" is the best story in the book, but it also only highlights the book's overriding weakness. The story's protagonist is a writer attempting to write a book about "mortal anxiety," which also appears to be the defining condition of the writer's own life. The story is presented mostly as a series of notes and brief episodes to be incorporated into the book. In the course of accumulating these notes, the protagonist latches on to the "alternate universe theory," according to which "events may have more than one outcome, with each outcome spinning off its own universe, so that millions of universes are generated each day. . . ." This notion then leads the author-protagonist to further reflection on the events in her own life (are there other universes in which her actions led to different outcomes?) as well as on the capacity of fiction to embody such alternate universes. It's a compelling enough metafiction, but again I can't see what calling it an "interfiction" instead of a metafiction accomplishes. Nor is it that clear why it would even be categorized as science fiction, despite the toying with the theory of alternate universes. It's a pretty good story, and trying to espy its "interstitial" qualities adds nothing to its appeal.

In her review, Martini asserts that "The stories in Interfictions operate. . .by existing in the spaces between what we want our genres to be." Speaking for myself, I don't what my genres to be anything but sources of interesting fiction. When it comes down to it, I don't even want genres, just worthwhile stories and novels. Whether you want to call them "interstitial" or "metafictional" or "postmodern" doesn't really matter much, and I suppose by that principle calling a group of stories "interfictions" isn't finally that objectionable, although in this case it is a needlessly byzantine way of arriving at the conclusion that a good piece of fiction "does interesting things with narrative and style" and, unfortunately, turns out not to be the most efficacious way of finding good fiction.

The Silence She Sought

On the one hand, it is easy enough to see how Sara Greenslit's The Blue of Her Body (Starcherone Books) could be called a "poet's novel." It makes no effort to "tell a story" in the ponderous, pedestrian mode too often adopted by novelists who come to fiction through an interest in narrative (as exemplified either in other fiction they've read or in movies) rather than an engagement with language and the possibilities of language in creating verbal art and exploring fresh ways of representing experience. There's no facile psychologizing of characters portrayed as "real people," no faux-dramatic plot points, no perfunctorily inserted dialogue straining to be "believable." No exposition, rising and falling action, or contrived resolution of the artificially induced "conflict." Instead, The Blue of Her Body is an artfully arranged construction of words, a novel that asks the reader to infer the "story" between the lines of its brief prose passages.

On the other hand, one would not call this novel "poetic" because it indulges in conventional figurative phrasing, lunges after arresting tropes, offers up an ostentatious display of "fine writing." Greenslit's prose is more matter-of-fact, more objectively descriptive:

Her rented house on the edge of town is small, chipped paint, all her own. She likes the windows, large and filled with trees. The morning light on the wood floor reminds her of her mother's caramel. The dog clatters through the house, pet hair collects in the corners. She no longer needs a vacuum. The broom is easier.

She has chosen birds over the soft other.

A week before her new job at the aviary starts, boxes are left stacked in the living room. She is afraid to put everything away. She fears the open space. She fears the silence she sought, the echoes. She had wanted these things, but now they loom and hover.

She brought only what was hers. But everything reminds her of Kate.

One chapter consists entirely of mostly one-sentence "paragraphs":

Whenever it was summer, I fell into a trance watching leaves on windy days

The sky was cloudless and blue like the spaces inside loved ones

Peregrine hacking box, nestling feather fuss down, eyes and beaks

Mother's summer garden: Asiatic lilies, red as a South American carnival, coneflowers about to unfold

When I was in love, I couldn't imagine any hands but yours. I smelled you while I worked, I saw you in our bed.

When I left, you wouldn't look me in the eye.

I was fool, fool to my mood.

I ate my pills day after day, unable to see.

One could say that the novel unfolds in lines and stanzas, rather than sequential prose paragraphs that disappear in the narrative flow they are meant to serve, although this does not so much make it a kind of prose poem as provoke us into considering the sometimes fine line between prose and verse, fiction and poetry. Why can't a novel proceed via evocative, carefully crafted sentences rather than routine, narrative-bearing paragraphs? At what point does the novelist leave to the poet the care and tending of language at its most fundamental level, the habitation of the word, the phrase, the sentence?

Much of what The Blue of Her Body is "about" is expressed in the first-quoted passage above: "She has chosen birds over the soft other." The novel's unnamed narrator has broken up with her lover in the city and moved into the country to work at an aviary. In her isolation, she considers her own history of depression, broods on her relationship with her mother (also a depressive) and her failed relationship with Kate, and takes the opportunity to further cultivate her love of animals. The novel in effect chronicles the narrator's convalescence, concluding with a variation on Emily Dickinson: "Hope is a damaged bird. She heals and then stays. . . ."

The narrator's dilemma and her attempt to work through it, however, are presented almost entirely through inference and suggestion. The story is purely backstory. In addition to the brief expository passages and the declarative sentences (sometimes stated in the third-person, sometimes in first-person), there are fragmentary accounts of the activity in the aviary, haiku-like descriptions of animals and of nature in general, and cumulative bits of information about the various efforts to treat the narrator's depression. While Greenslit thus avoids converting the narrator's circumstances into narrative melodrama, ultimately her novel does present a coherent and convincing, if oblique, portrait of its protagonist's struggle to gather her life into some semblance of order and purpose.

I believe that the future of prose fiction will only lead it closer to a kind of rapprochement with poetry, where the novel began as a splintering-off of narrative from the storytelling mode of epic poetry (just as drama appropriated the "dramatic" in dramatic poetry). Now that film and television (as well as what is called "creative nonfiction") have in turn taken over the storytelling function, at least for the mass audience, fiction's continued relevance, aside from those novels seemingly written with the film adaptation in mind, will perhaps require that it return to its origins in the poet's attention to language per se. Experimental fiction almost always points us in this direction, as challenges to the hegemony of conventional storytelling usually entail a reinvigoration of the resources of language, highlighting the capacity of prose fiction to do something else. The Blue of Her Body is an admirable addition to this effort.

Vanity

According to Jonathan Gottschall, a critical proponent of what has come to be called "literary Darwinism":

Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.

According to Sabrina Seelig, in an article on translated fiction:

. . .the works in The World Through the Eyes of Writers, while dealing with the same painful things that are covered in the news all the time, take the same hashed-out facts and gave them sense, potency, life. Reading stories that do this lifts a curtain: not on some generalized world or broad state of a country, but on specific realities about the ways people live.. There is a vast difference between reading about a killing in the news and listening to, getting inside the head of the mother of that victim. Not only getting inside her head, but picking through the rubble guided by a skilled author drawing out colors, textures, whispering names and prayers.

I bring together these at first only marginally related quotes--both writers agree that reading fiction is about "getting inside the head," but Gottschall is ultimately taking literary critics to task for their insufficient understanding of human nature, while Seelig is (admirably) calling for more English translations of "foreign" fiction--because in their assumptions about the ultimate purposes of fiction they perhaps reveal why innovative or "experimental" fiction is so often dismissed by both readers and critics. And, as it happens, the inadequacy of both of these views of what fiction is for is brought into sharp relief by a very provocative (and translated) novel I've just read, Vain Art of the Fugue (Dalkey Archive), by the Romanian author Dumitru Tsepeneag.

Gottschall's notion that fiction presents the reader (the critic being a more skilled reader) with the opportunity to scrutinize characters as if they were real people whose "craniums" can be opened to discover "what makes them tick" is no doubt widely shared. "Psychological realism" in the modern novel provides us access to "the Mind," which apparently many critics think is a very profound thing to do and makes the novel distinctive from the other forms of narrative art that have arisen to challenge the novel's hegemony. The Literary Darwinists accept that something like psychological realism is the novel's raison d'etre, but they feel that most literary critics aren't sufficiently knowledgable about the biological imperatives instilled in us by natural selection to be able to discuss "evolutionary psychology" intelligently. Only by understanding how these imperatives influence human behavior are we really able to understand fiction credibly.

Vain Art of the Fugue makes all of this utterly beside the point. There are characters in the novel, but they keep changing in their identities and behavior. In the first brief section, a man steps onto a bus, thinks someone has called out to him and so turns to look, sees nothing and moves on into the bus. The second section, at first still narrated by the man in the first, follows him on his trip to the train station but is soon interrupted by a third-person account of what happened to the man prior to catching the bus. He was apparently visiting a woman named Maria (or is she his wife or his mistress?), who urges him to go before he misses the bus. He leaves the house, passes a dog "with the mouth of a fox," as well as a man killing a pig, being watched by "several women in pink dresses." Getting closer to the bus stop, he also encounters a a cyclist carrying fish in his saddle bag.

The first-person narration begins again, as the man urges the bus driver to hurry. Now it seems he is going to the station to meet a woman named Magda. He imagines the confusion he'll find on the train platform and projects seeing an old man "dragging along a kind of box with a handle." The narrator continues to nag at the bus driver, who finally tells him to stop. He looks outside the bus window and sees a woman smiling at him. "If I hadn't been in such a hurry, I think I'd have jumped off the bus and gone after her," he tells us. At this point the imagery begins to repeat itself in different iterations, as it will for the rest of the novel: The man is at the station where the woman is now looking at him "vacantly"; the dog appears again, blocking his path; he walks along the street, where "a cyclist is trying to pedal along," the fish in his saddle bag now joined by a loaf of bread on top of it. The narration continues to switch from first-person to third-person as the man is back to the beginning of the story, racing to catch the bus. As the section comes to an end, we are introduced to other characters who will make subsequent re-appearances: the engineer, the conductor, the ticket-collector, an attractive woman with "tanned thighs."

These characters and their bare-bones actions are shuffled and reshuffled throughout the novel. This reshuffling is, in fact, the novel's fundamental structural principle. No plot beyond the effort to get to the station, no character development beyond what is added in each transmutation, which sometimes subverts and contradicts what we think we've learned before. We couldn't crack open craniums and "spelunk through the bewildering complexity" even if we wanted to (and the novel gives us no reason to want to) since the "bewildering complexity" is all external, in the mode of storytelling itself. The characters are the interchangeable bits, strips of narrative possibility, that make the storytelling possible.

The novel's title, of course, tells us that the specific formal inspiration for its unconventional approach is the fugue, the musical form in which an initial theme or "voice" is repeated numerous times through imitation and variation. As in a musical fugue, the effect of this strategy in Vain Art of the Fugue is to take our attention away from simple linear development (in fiction, "story") and to consider instead the way a theme or episode can be developed laterally, so to speak, through a kind of accumulation of slight changes. And the art of the literary fugue is "vain," that is, unapologetically aesthetic, without pretense to psychological enlightenment or social commentary (although the occasional image of a tank rolling through the streets of Bucharest does certainly evoke Communist-era realities). The primary interest in Vain Art of the Fugue is formal; it substitutes for the easy "entertainment" of story a delight in formal manipulation. The reader must give up an accustomed passivity for a more active alterness in the face of the novel's constant (and constantly inventive) metamorphoses, but is this really more onerous than relying on the critic-drudge who will "pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators" and reveal to us the secrets of human motivation? More boring?

Tsepeneag's novel also fails to provide the "news" that Sabrina Seelig thinks is the hallmark of translated fiction. Its focus is resolutely on the commonplace, the habitual, the universal elements of human experience. The "events" related in Vain Art of the Fugue literally could happen almost anywhere. There really are no "specific realities about the ways people live" except the realities about the way everyone lives. The novel does not act as a travelogue or newsmagazine, offers only a few ordinary names (that continually shift--sometimes Maria is Magda and Magda is Maria), whispers no prayers. The only thing that's "exotic" about this book--exoticism being what Seelig really seems to be after--is its aesthetic form, its challenge to casual assumptions about what fiction--translated or otherwise--is supposed to be like. You're not going to learn much about Romania as "other" from Vain Art of the Fugue. You'll just see yourself and your own immersion in the inescapable flux of existence.

Both Gottschall and Seelig are working with a conceptual model of fiction that sees it as a fixed form--in Gottschall's case a model that applies (partly) to the kind of fiction that was dominant prior to World War II but that has been shaken up and spun around in all the years since. It has recognizable characters whose psyches we can analyze (if we accept the Darwinist tools) and tells stories that "lift a curtain" on "the ways people live." Vain Art of the Fugue is one of those frame-breaking novels that demonstrate such a model only constrains the adventurous writer's imagination and encourages a dessicated understanding of fiction's still unexploited possibilities for aesthetic surprise. It's the sort of novel everyone who thinks he/she knows what novels should be like ought to read, and be utterly disabused of such certainty.

Literary Reputations

Kelly Jane Torrance believes that while "Experimentalism — successful or not — has often counted highly in making a literary reputation," fortunately "there are signs that literary modernism. . .is not aging well."

Torrance provides no evidence for this assertion, aside from her own impatience with William Faulkner (as well as that of music critic Tim Page, for whom Faulkner does "absolutely nothing") and a recent book listing the "favorite" books of 125 current writers. Curiously, Torrance claims that "The closest thing to a modernist book on the list is Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby," when in fact The Top Ten includes both Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Nabokov's Lolita. This already suggests that Torrance has a somewhat. . .incomplete understading of what "modernism" refers to, but she is correct to suggest that modernist fiction initiated an emphasis on "experiment," and it's obvious enough she doesn't think much of it. (Whether she dislikes the stylistic gymanastics of Proust as much as she does those of Faulkner remains unclear.)

Unfortunately, Torrance is incorrect in maintaining that "Experimentalism counts for a lot" when it comes to judging works of fiction. While the passage of time has made it impossible for us to discount the work of Joyce or Proust or Faulkner, whose books will remain on all serious readers' reading lists, "experimentalism" in current fiction is more likely to be dismiseed by reviewers in much the way Torrance does in this article. It's too "sef-indulgent," too "clever," too inaccesible. Many of the writers who are deemed "experimental" and have managed to garner some critical acclaim, as well as some popularity--Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer--are not really experimentalists at all but more or less conventional social realists who give their books an occasional postmodern tweak. Others--George Saunders, Aimee Bender--are at best mild satirists pretending to be daring surrealists. For the most part, American fiction is dominated by writers engaged in standard-issue storytelling influenced by modernism only--when at all--in the use of "psychological realism" as a device for representing events subjectively (from a character's limited perspective) rather than objectively through an omniscient narrator, or for pretending to portray "how we think." If Kelly Jane Torrance believes otherwise, she needs to read more contemporary fiction.

Regrettably, Torrance launches these fusillades against experimentalism in defense of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Dawn Powell, all of whom are allegedly undervalued by canon-makers and deserve to be placed among the very best modern writers. (Torrance compares them only to other 20th century writers, so I presume she's leaving writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, and James--experiementalists all, at least in the context of their time--for another attack.) I don't myself need to be convinced that Wharton and Cather should be included on Modern Novel syllabi and should be considered the literary equal of contemporaries such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. (I'd even judge them superior to Fitzgerald, who has always seemed to me a very minor writer whose "reputation" is built more on the facts of his biography than on the quality of his work. His fiction is mostly noteworthy as social history rather than literature, as is the work of Dawn Powell as well. I've tried reading her, but I'll just have to echo Tim Page in saying her books do "absolutely nothing for me.") I don't think too many other readers of American fiction need to be convinced, either, and thus Torrance's attempt to elevate them by simultaneously diminishing their supposed modernist rivals is a particularly egregious zero-sum move. Their work isn't better than we thought because we've suddenly discovered that Faulkner's is worse.

In fact, Torrance does a disservice to both of these writers in insisting they be considered rivals with Hemingway or Faulkner or Proust, as somehow anomalous figures in early 20th century fiction. Really the best she can do with Wharton is to celebrate her prodigious output (more prodigious than Hemingway's or Fitzgerald's) and her avoidance of "booze-fueled antics," and in discussing Wharton's great book The House of Mirth she can give us only this lame account:

The novel is a profound exploration of American society through the story of one woman trying to hang onto her soul. It's all there — the pursuit of wealth, the American dream of social mobility, social expectations versus individual desire, the plight of women.

"It's all there"--all the great "themes" stuffed into the novel like an overlarge pillow into its case. Nothing about the way in which Wharton rather daringly plays with the convention of the "rogue" character, substituting a woman protagonist for the usual male figure to be found in many 19th century novels. Nor is there any mention of Wharton's modernist-like preoccupation with matters of form and style. As Herminone Lee herself says in a recent interview: "She was wedded to the idea of objectivity, control, shape, form -- she's a great shaper of sentences, sentence by sentence on the page; at her best she's a remarkable stylist." Similarly with Cather, Torrance doesn't mention the Wharton/James-inspired craftsmanship of Alexander's Bridge, the manipulations of perspective in My Antonia, the formal "shapeliness" of a book like A Lost Lady. Instead, she gossips about Cather's purported lesbianism and gives us a few platitudes: Cather's work explores "the spirit that built America"; it "has so much to do so directly with the most central problems of living," or so says Joan Acocella, quoted by Torrance. Why would any of this provoke those who haven't read Wharton or Cather to do so, except as a gesture aimed against "modernism"?

Experimental fiction attempts to explore the unexploited possibilities of fiction beyond its established function as a medium for prose storytelling. The fiction of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather is not self-consciously "experimental," but neither is it merely prose storytelling these writers fastened on "to chronicle the American psyche," as Torrance also puts it. Torrance underestimates the extent to which both of these writers regarded fiction first of all as an aesthetic form to be "shaped" in distinctive ways. This conception of fiction's purpose, that it is available to the literary artist as a form without pre-established limits, I take to be one of the guiding principles of literary modernism. What good does it do to the "reputation" of either Wharton or Cather to suggest they rejected this principle?

Notated

In a recent Los Angeles Times article about Granta's "Best of Young American Novelists" issue, there is a great deal of talk about the "themes" that the included writers are said to be addressing. While immigration and its legacy seems to be the common theme of this particular "snapshot" anthology, we are also told that some of the issue's judges "were dismayed by the lack of attention to social class in the work of these young novelists across the ethnic and national spectrum." Laura Miller believes that neither of these subjects is really where it's at with current young fiction writers: "The real themes in American fiction these days, she said, are the seeking of 'authenticity' — which sometimes works itself out in stories about immigrant communities — and interpreting the highly mediated, pop-suffused culture."

Nowhere in this article about supposedly important new writing is there any discussion, not even the briefest mention, of the aesthetic features, formal and stylistic, that characterize the stories collected in "Best of Young American Novelists", features that presumably ought to count for something when determining what makes these paticular selections the "best" that might be found. What formal innovations, if any, are these writers pursuing? What insights into the possibilities of language in representing human experience, immigrant or otherwise, might be found in the stylistic explorations of their work? Such questions are not addressed; from the comments made by those involved in putting the anthology together, one has to conclude they were not considered relevant to the larger question of what fiction writers of this next generation are trying to "say."

The view of fiction implicit in this article's discussion of the newest and the latest is that it is a forum for "expression." Writers "express" themselves, and through them their ethnic or class heritage gets expressed. Taken as whole, the writers included in the Granta anthology express the concerns and preoccupations of their generational cohort. Why exactly such writers would choose the indirect and rhetorically impure mode of fiction--which unavoidably is going to disperse and obscure your "themes" unless you run them diligently roughshod--in order to give "expression" to such things is never made clear. Nor is it ever quite clear why anyone would care about such expressions in the first place. If "saying something" is important to you as a writer, perhaps nonfiction is a better choice. Better yet, if sociology or cultural anthropology is what you're really interested in, become an actual sociologist and ponder the effects of immigration or class or interpret mass culture to your heart's content. Perhaps some people might even be interested in what you thus have to say. But don't reduce fiction to a more entertaining branch of social science.

In fairness, it's probably the editors and the critics who contribute most to this metamorphosis of literature into sociology and politics. It gives them something to write about at a time when most of them don't know how to write about the aesthetics of literature, anyway. It's an easy way to convert literary criticism into "literary journalism." And it's this focus on the "journalism" of literature and the avoidance of the "merely literary" that largely explains the impatience and incredulity with which so many editors and critics confront works of fiction that do manifestly ask the reader to consider their formal and stylistic qualities above whatever "theme" they may be assigned, especially if such works can be regarded as "experimental."

Joshua Cohen's Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press) will surely strike most readers as experimental, and, although the novel does in fact raise issues related to immigration and ethnicity, few would ultimately conclude that the author's primary purpose is "expression" in the sense I've discussed. It is resolutely an attempt to reconfigure the formal elements of fiction (although not to dispense with them.) Like any good experimental novel, it first of all provokes us to ask: Is this a novel at all? And, as good experimental novels do as well, it ultimately leads us to answer our own question: Why not?

Disinguished virtuosi, acclaimed virtuosos and virtuosas of this greatest orchestra in the world, members and memberesses of this fine ensemble, tuxedos and dressed of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, you behind me I've stooped to rehearse with for far too many seasons now and have yet to conquer, consider this your cue! to draw out the longbows: downbows for the 1st violins, upbows for the 2nds--the bowings are as necessary as they are Schniedermann's written into your parts, yes believe it or not, in his own hand, and such hands! (though I helped some, because among many other lacks in this country was a publisher) and, yes, let's have the final cadence, drawn out to the last and stiffest hair, to the frog and to the tip of the bow as they're called,

okay! gasp, and we don't want anyone asphyxiating on us, now do we?

Will the orchestra please stop? desist?

Everyone finished?

Gasp, it's okay! If you all just remain seated, and listen, I promise that no one will get hurt. Trust me, everything's going to turn out fine.

So declares renowned violinist Laster as he is about to begin his solo (the cadenza) in his friend Schneidermann's concerto. As we will discover, the elderly Schneidermann is missing (he excused himself from a matinee showing of Schindler's List and Laster hasn't seen him since), possibly dead, and Laster has apparently decided that a proper tribute to the composer requires him to speak instead of play. Which he does, for 380 pages.

You'll never find answers in music, only more questions, and so, yes, I have a speaking part, not quite notated, not quite mentioned in the program you've glanced through and idly referenced, riffled through the least piano of my pinanissimos and are manically flipping through to see if I have a history of mental instability, some schizoid personality disorder that would serve to explain this away.

My decision to address you with my voice instead of with my violin.

Schneidermann, as it turns out, is a Holocaust survivor and, in Laster's view, an unjustly neglected composer, the "iconoclast even the iconoclasts worshipped," while he, Laster, has lived a relatively privileged life as a soloist:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, good evening kids of all ages, good evening my exwives and my wife and prospective wives, good evening some of my own children out there in the audience, good evening my lawyer, my agent, my accountant, good evening my recordlabel execs, good evening my podiatrist (who just last Thursday she told me that my onychauxis it had developed into onychogryphosis, had a professional trim my nails). . . .

Through Laster's mammoth spiel, we learn about both Schneidermann's and his own past, about how despite Schneidermann's experience in the Shoah he considered himself one of the last Old World Europeans, about Jewish history, about music. . .It's a fragmented piece of storytelling, to be sure, but eventually we learn those sorts of things we need to know about the characters--and really Laster and Schniedermann dominate the story--and their circumstances that we would get from a more straightforwardly related narrative. Laster is an unusual first-person narrator, but that's what he is, and we ultimately must judge him and his roundabout tale in the same way we would judge a more conventional first-person account.

In other words, the conventional elements of fiction are in play in this novel (substituting for the real playing of the concerto, as it were), but they are rhetorically shuffled in Laster's discontinuous streams of speech. The reader is asked to show a little patience, do a little honest work for his/her pleasure. The novel implicitly asks that we take the reading of a novel to be a unique experience, not just another rote variation on an a pre-established theme, just as Laster's "cadenza" is unlike any previously heard.

And there certainly are pleasures to be found in this novel, however much the easy ones are deferred. Many of the anecdotes Laster relates are compelling, some hillarious; over the long run, Laster's voice, and thus Laster himself, is vividly rendered, leading us through what becomes an hours-long exhortation, even if what we finally remember is probably less Schniedermann (who remains, perhaps unavoidably so, somewhat distanced and enigmatic) than Laster's own desperate attempt to make us remember him. More than anything else, however, there is the language, the Yiddish-inflected, frequently over-the-top speaking style exemplified in the passages I have already quoted. Cohen is skillful indeed in deploying this language, and if readers are able to accustom themselves to Laster's strung-out, stop/start way of summoning up those events that have culminated in this night at Carnegie Hall, they will surely find themselves enjoying the jokes, the deliberate or not-so-deliberate malapropisms, the puns, the occasional passages of real eloquence.

Some readers might balk at a novel that at first seems so determined to avoid "entertainment." (Laster, after all, himself seemingly interrupts the entertainment in order to berate his audience with his words, to get them to pay attention to his verbal cadenza and not just passively admire his musical one. At the same time, one could regard Laster as a kind of Catskill tummler, a stand-up comic who in discarding his role as Serious Artist discovers another talent for schtick.) But I have to say that ultimately I found Cadenza for the Schniedermann Violin Concerto to be abundantly entertaining, both as a "story" that is satisfying if deliberately circuitous and as an experiment in storytelling. I enjoy witnessing a writer, any artist, imaginatively transform the medium in which he is working, and I believe Cohen does an impressive job at sustaining his experiment--to make this rambling kind of storytelling itself part of the "point" of the story--over 300+ pages. (The jokes and the fascinating tidbits of information help.) Cohen has succeeded in taking one man's headlong attempt at "expression" and, through relentless artifice, almost a parody of the will to express, created an aesthetically complex (and engaging, precisely because it is complex) work of fiction.

Note: In a review at Barnstorm, Tim Horvath discusses the "content" of Cadenza more fully than I do here.

A Safe and Useless Place

Frank Wilson thinks that "artistic experiment" is defined by the amount of "trial and error" involved. He takes the scientific "experiment" to be the model for the use of "experimental" as a classificatory term in the discussion of literature. Scott Esposito more or less accepts Wilson's definition, although he has no problem with "art experiments being praised as ends in themselves," something about which Wilson seems skeptical. Scott also suggests that "unlike in science, we can continually come back to and learn new things from successful literary experiments, or simply admire their beauty."

Actually, we can probably do the same with certain especially compelling scientific experiments, but I think both Scott and Frank are mistaken to view "experiment" in literature as essentially analgous to the way the term is understood in science. Scott is correct in asserting that "a lot of trial and error is involved in the writing of most novels," and for that very reason "trial and error" is not really very helpful in capturing what literary critics/scholars have meant by using "experimental fiction" in describing selected works of fiction, especially fiction written since 1945, "experimental." For the most part, critical commentary on postwar experimental fiction (more broadly "postmodern" fiction) has focused on "experiment" as, in Jerome Klinkowitz's words, the "disruption" of a "conservative stability of form" in literary fiction (Literary Disruptions, 1980). Klinkowitz thought this stability had reigned since the 1920s, but it probably goes back farther than that, to the establishment of realism in the mid/late 19th century--experimentalists such as Joyce and Woolf could be said to have also "disrupted" this stability of form (often characterized as the "well-made story"), although their experiments did not disrupt the assumptions of realism itself, were in fact an extension of these assumptions into what is now called "psychological realism." From this perspective, "trial and error" is not so much the guiding principle of experiment (except insofar as it involves finding appropriate methods of disruption) as is the notion that "stability"--to which scientific experiments always return--is itself not a desirable state where the art of fiction is concerned.

It is true that the term "experimental fiction" is a catch-all term of convenience that doesn't necessarily signal anything very specific about what particular writers might be up to in their efforts to, if not "make it new," then "make it different." Thus Klinkowitz prefers "disruption," while other critics have written about "breaking the sequence" or "the art of excess" or "anti-story." In most cases, however, these critics are really interested in what Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs in Breaking the Sequence simply accept as "innovations in form." Friedman and Fuchs also provide a handy description of the elements of "stability" against which most innovative writers are rebelling: "Plot linearity that implies a story's purposeful forward movement; a single, authoritative storyteller; well-motivated characters interacting in recognizable social patterns; the crucial conflict deterring the protagonist from the ultimate goal; the movement to closure. . . ." Perhaps the most succinct statement of the motivations underlying experimental fiction would be the remarks made by John Hawkes, which I've quoted on this blog before: "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."

A critic who did use the term "experimental fiction" straightforwardly was Robert Scholes in his book Fabulation and Metafiction. In the chapter of that book called "The Nature of Experimental Fiction," he writes: "Forms atrophy and lose touch with the vital ideas of fiction. Originality in fiction, rightly understood, is the successful attempt to find new forms that are capable of tapping once again the sources of fictional vitality." Scholes's book popularized the term "metafiction" as a more specific term describing the tendencies in postwar American fiction that made readers think of them as "experimental": "Metafiction. . .attempts to assault or transcend the laws of fiction--an undertaking which can only be achieved from within fictional form." Writers like Gass, Barth, Coover, and Barthleme were "working in that rarefied air of metafiction, trying to climb beyond Beckett and Borges, toward things than no critic--not even a metacritic, if there were such a thing--can discern."

Eventually that air probably became too "rarefied." Many readers came to associate metafiction--and thus "experimental fiction"--as "game-playing," an obsession with "art" over "life." This perception probably informs Frank Wilson's disdain for experiments "as ends in themselves." (Also his disinclination to think of Joyce as an experimenter--Joyce "knew from the start what he was going to do and how he was going to do it" and would never have stooped to mere "experiment.") It may also explain why Christopher Sorrentino, in a comment on Scott Esposito's post, observes that "while I have met a great many novelists ranging in outlook and approach from Ben Marcus to Jonathan Franzen, not a single one of them to my knowledge has ever described his/her work as 'experimental.'" While the writers associated with the Journal of Experimental Fiction would probably be less skittish about the designation than Marcus or Franzen, it probably is now true that many "experimental" writers (putting aside whether Ben Marcus or Jonathan Franzen are actually very innovative in the first place), are uncomfortable with the word as applied to their work. I'd still accept the explanation given by Raymond Federman, who coined the term "surfiction" as an alternative to "metafiction" in identifying his own brand of experimental fiction:

The kind of fiction I am interested in is that fiction which the leaders of the literary establishment (publishers, editors, agents, and reviewers alike)* brush aside because it does not conform to their notions of what fiction should be; that fiction which supposedly has no value (commercially understood) for the common reader. And the easiest way for these people to brush aside that kind of fiction is to label it, quickly and bluntly, as experimental fiction. Everything that does not fall into the category of successful fiction (commericially that is), or what Jean-Paul Sartre once called "nutritious literature," everything that is found "unreadable for our readers". . .is immediately relegated to the domain of experimentation--a safe and useless place. (Surfiction, 1975)

* Including Frank Wilson?

Some Life's Life-Story

The first "chapter" of Michael Martone is headed "Contributor's Note" and informs us that

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was educated in the public schools there. His first published work, a poem titled "Recharging Time," and a character sketch, "Tim, the Experience," about his brother, appeared in the Forum, an annual literary magazine produced by the school system featuring contributions from its students. His mother, a high school freshman English teacher at the time, in fact, wrote the poem and the character sketch, signing her son's name to the work and sending it to the editor, another English teacher at a south side junior high school who had been a sorority sister, Kappa Alpha Theta, in college. Indeed, most of his papers written for school were written by his mother. . . .

The second chapter, also a Contributor's Note (as are all but three of the book's forty-five brief chapters), tells us that

Michael Martone was born at St. Joseph's Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1955. It is interesting to note that the attending physician was a Doctor Frank Burns, Major, United States Army, retired, and recently returned to Fort Wayne following service in the police action in Korea. . . .

Obviously, readers of this book will quickly enough conclude they have come upon a resolutely unconventional, mischievous work of fiction. Is it a collection of stories in which the stories have been replaced by (or hidden in) these parodic notes, or, given its consistent focus on "Michael Martone," the book's mock-autobiographical protagonist, is it a novel, albeit one without the kinds of narrative/structural markers we customarily use to identify the form? Perhaps we should take it as one of those boundary-crossing fictions that deliberately provokes us into reconsidering our assumptions about form, even suggests that we should be less vigilant in patrolling those boundaries?

Even if we regard Michael Martone as a kind of novel, unified by its portrayal of the life of its title character, what do we make of the reference to Frank Burns, a pre-established fictional character we are asked to believe literally brought "Michael Martone" into the world, or, indeed, of this passage from another Contributor's Note a few pages later?:

Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there, leaving, at age seventeen, to work as a roustabout in the last traveling circus to winter in the state. He has held many jobs since then, including night auditor in a resort hotel, stenographer for the National Labor Relations Board, and clerk for a regional bookstore chain run by associates of the Gambino crime family. For the last twenty years Martone has been digging ditches. . . .

Beyond conflicting with a previous note informing us that "MM" currently "lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he teaches at the university" (and beyond its status as a send-up of certain kind of "school of hard knocks" contributor's note), this note makes it clear we can't accept the book's autobiographical elements at face value. Major Burns exists only on film, and Michael Martone (the corporeal author) is not a professional ditch digger. "Michael Martone" is a fictional character created by Michael Martone, and once introduced into the text, this character is bound only by the possibilities it might be made to serve within the work--in this case, possibilities revealed through variation and metamorphosis. This playfulness makes it necessary that readers relax their expectations of continuity in both character development and plot, but it is also ultimately the source of Michael Martone's considerable appeal.

But Michael Martone certainly does not fail to provide more conventional and accessible ways of engaging the reader's interest as well. For all its prankish blurring of the lines between author/character and reality/invention, the book finally does present a compelling and complete account of the life of "Michael Martone," an account that really coheres around the other character introduced in that first Contributor's Note, MM's mother, and the city of Fort Wayne. However much we should hesitate before identifying the mother as the mother of Michael Martone, the portrayal of her that emerges from this book is surely a tribute of sorts to Martone's own mother, who, if she didn't write all of his papers for him, must surely through her example have been the inspiration for his career choice. And the city of Fort Wayne, as ordinary and quintessentially Midwestern as it must be, clearly retains Martone's affection. (As does the state of Indiana, in which most of Martone's fiction continues to be set.)

Surely, too, Michael Martone explores serious enough themes: the role of representation, the permeability of fact and fiction, the effects of contingency and chance. Perhaps the most explicitly stated theme is expressed in the book's final lines:

Martone marvels at the intersection of lines, colliding and flying apart in the condensation of a cloud chamber window. Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.

Or as that first composition published by "Michael Martone" might imply: The novelist's job frequently comes down to "recharging time."

But it must also be said that, finally, this is a very entertaining book. In my opinion, it does what the very best "experimental" fiction always manages to do. Having abandoned the tried and the true, the formulaic and the merely conventional, it substitutes an approach and uncovers devices that nevertheless capture the reader's attention, afford the reader soemthing that could be called aesthetic delight.

Taking Risks

In a review of Aimee Bender's Willful Creatures, CL Bledsoe concludes that "Bender is that most daring of writers, who will take any risk, regardless of the consequences." I couldn't disagree more. I've read The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures, and I don't think she takes any risks at all. Her stories display only a kind of surrealistic whimsy that I, for one, find mostly cloying.

Take, for example, "Ironhead," a story from Willful Creatures that Bledsoe singles out for discussion, claiming it is a story in which Bender "portray[s] even the oddest characters not simply as running gags, but with emotional depth." It is hard for me to find the "emotional depth" in passages like this, which to the contrary exhibit only a cartoon-like sentimentality: "The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on the his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standing by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. The pumpkinhead mother quickly put the iron away; she understood; she imagined it was much the way she felt when one of her humanhead friends offered her a piece of seaonal pie on Thanksgiving." This is as much "emotional" portrayal of these characters as we get; the rest of the story continues to wring equally asinine changes on an already dopy idea. Once we've registered the unbeguiling notion that a boy has been born with an iron for a head, the story has little to offer. It continues to rely on faux-naive phrasing ("a very gently boy," "played quietly") and an altogther formulaic plot--the iron-headed boy dies, of course, leaving everyone very sad. I suppose one could characterize the story as a "running gag," but then the gag would need to be funny in the first place.

Or take "The End of the Line," in which a "big man" goes to a pet store "to buy himself a little man to keep him company." Nothing in this story (Bledsoe calls it a "surreal parable") is other than predictable and smarmy, once one allows for its tepidly surrealistic premise. "After about the third week. . .the big man took to torturing the little man." The little man contemplates his escape but is unable to accomplish it. The big man sets the little man free, but decides to follow the little man as he drives away in a "small blue bus"--he "just wanted to see where they lived." A (literally) little girl looks up at the "giant" who has found them and wonders at the "size of the pity that kept unbuckling in her heart."

For a "parable" like this to work, in my opinion, it either has to implicitly examine the structural and thematic assumptions of the parable itself (in the process reconfiguring the possibilities of the form) or it has to manifest some stylistic vigor to compensate for the formulaic nature of parables and fables. Kafka, Borges, Calvino, and Barthleme, for example, are writers able to carry out such tasks, but Bender's stories do neither. Plot exists to reveal the mawkishly cute characters and situations (cute even in their occasional freakishness), but is otherwise so conventional as to be simply perfunctory. And her style is even less interesting, usually just an excuse to "shock" the reader with a seemingly outlandish situation that is really just silly:

The motherfucker arrived at the West Coast from the Midwest. He took a train, and met women of every size and shape in different cities--Tina with the straight-ahead knees in Milwaukee, Annie with the caustic laugh in Chicage, Betsy's lopsided cleavage in Bismark, crazy Heddie in Butte, that lion tamer in Vegas, the smart farm girl from Bakersfield. Finally, he dismounted for good at Union Station in Lost Angeles.

"I fuck mothers," he said to anyone who asked him. "And I do it well."

One could imagine a writer like, say, Stanley Elkin, taking this set-up and running with it, transforming it through his inimitable style and comic imagination into an extended fiction full of narrative ingenuity and aesthetic delight. But in Bender's rendering it becomes an utterly straight-faced account of a man with a quaintly unconventional sexual proclivity who is given to such statements as "Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can't fit under the sky, too large."

I do not mean to single out CL Bledsoe's review for criticism. It has become common for reviewers to identify Bender as a risk-taker, her fiction as an example of what passes for "innovative" writing among the graduates of the better MFA programs. (Bledsoe even comes close to accurately describing Bender's fiction when she calls it "like a rich dessert," except that, for me at least, it is more like sugar overload.) But calling such work innovative or experimental simply because it distorts ordinary reality in some fairy tale-ish sort of way doesn't really do the cause of experimental fiction much good. Experimental fiction challenges the formal constraints imposed by past practices; it does not seek out alternative methods in order, finally, to just tell the same old stories in only superficially different ways. Bender's fiction accepts those constraints and relates decidedly familiar stories dressed up in gaudy but cheap disguises.

What May Lie Hidden

In an essay defending experimental fiction, Marc Lowe writes:

. . .the majority of popular critics and readers the world over, ultimately, still seem to crave the same thing they always have when it comes right down to it: entertainment. Is it not true that most individuals are primarily, if not exclusively, interested in believable characters with memorable names and realistically portrayed attributes (e.g. Samuel Sellers, the rotund jeweler with a tic in his left eye who picks his flat nose with the end of his pipe holder; Linda Lacy, the woman with the sequined stockings who sucks on peeled carrot sticks in order to satiate her oral fixation), plots that resolve themselves in a decisive, if blandly predictable, manner (too many loose ends make for angry readers, despite the public’s ubiquitous cry—which still resounds in chain bookstores around the English-speaking world—for “realistic” and “believable” characters and situations), and, most of all, a clear and understandable (i.e. linear and tidy) storyline with a consistent style of narration (no abrupt shifts in tense/time, no blurring of who’s who or what’s what, etc.), so that there is little or no need to have to stop and think for even a single moment about what may lie hidden beneath the surface of the words written on the page?. . . .

Although I am myself an advocate on behalf of experimental fiction, I think this analysis goes a little too far. More precisely, it doesn't accurately describe the situation as it exists among serious readers of fiction in the early 21st century.

The question isn't really whether "popular critics and readers" accept or reject experimental fiction. The mass audience rejects "literary fiction" of even the most conventional, most character-driven kind. The challenge for experimental writers and sympathetic critics is to convince readers who might be looking for more than "entertainment" to move beyond what now passes for "literary" fiction to consider alternatives that are just as literary, if not as immediately recognizable as variations on an established form. With these readers, the situation is not as dire as Lowe suggests.

Most such readers have surely assimilated the innovations of modernist/postmodernist fiction to the extent they do not expect characters like "Samuel Sellers" and "Linda Lacy." If anything, the norm is now what I have in previous posts called "psychological realism," a technique pioneered by writers such as James, Joyce, and Woolf that seeks to portray the world as it is experienced by the characters in a given novel or story, not necessarily to emphasize those characters' "realistically portrayed attributes" if those attributes are external to consciousness. And I really do believe readers are more tolerant of stories that do not "resolve themselves in a decisive. . .manner" than Lowe gives them credit for (unless the stories are themselves decisively situated in a generic framework that more or less demands resolution of plot details). Indeed, what has variously been called "minimalism" or "dirty realism" is more or less predicated on the assumption that in the end nothing much will happen--on the surface at least. Finally, it seems to me especially true that readers of literary fiction are open to narratives that are structured as something other than "a clear and understandable (i.e. linear and tidy) storyline with a consistent style of narration." Fragmentation, chronological displacement, shifts in point of view, and other forms of non-linear storytelling are quite common in contemporary literary fiction, so common that I would say the sort of naively realistic, unswervingly linear narrative Lowe describes is in a distinct minority among the books that appeal to today's literary reader.

I don't think it does much of a service to experimental fiction to offer as rhetorical straw men either the mass audience who would be just as impatient with John Updike as with Gilbert Sorrentino, or the "anachronistic 19th century model" Lowe complains of. (Aspiring experimental writers could in fact learn quite a lot, about character creation and narrative development, from writers like Dickens and Hardy.) Serious writers will never attract a "popular" audience (I don't see why they would want to), and contemporary fiction for the most part does not proceed according to the 19th-century model. (It is especially mistaken to conclude that 19th-century writers were both relentless storytellers and "realist" in their approach to representation; in many cases the one is in conflict with the other, and these writers can be illustrative of the ways the two impulses can or can't be reconciled.) Better to seek out those readers who may already be at least half-interested in what experimental fiction might accomplish and convince them to risk the other half as well.

Defending Barth

In his review of John Barth's Where 3 Roads Meet, Traver Kauffman maintains that the book consists of a "trio of loosely connected novellas." I have to disagree. That the book is a "trio" is true enough (and the word itself highlights the book's central conceit), but the three novellas it includes are actually very tightly connected, although not through overlapping characters or setting or some other superficial element of continuity. Where 3 Roads Meet is very much a composed book, and anyone who reads it as merely a conveniently collected group of fictions somewhat longer than short stories but too short to be called novels will be missing out on the features of the book most relevant to Barth's purpose.

The book is unified, first and foremost, through the motif named in its title. It acts as both a structural and a thematic device, at the same time foregrounding the image of three roads meeting (for Barth a symbol of fertility, both physical and artistic) and providing a rich source of cross-textual echoes and recurrences that substitute for the narrative momentum that, in typical Barthian fashion, is constantly interrupted and redoubled, seemingly always about to move dramatically forward but never quite doing so. Thus there are corresponding situations/groups of characters: three college students (who also play together in a jazz trio) in the first novella, Tell Me; the three elements in the literary interchange, Tale, Teller, Reader, embodied as characters in the unabashedly metafictional I've Been Told; three sisters (symbolically representing the Three Graces) in the final novella, As I Was Saying.

In Tell Me, the three students are engaged in a love triangle, in I've Been Told (the "story of the Story"), tale and reader are carried successfully by their Dramatic Vehicle (driven by the teller) away from the place where three roads meet to a narrative climax of sorts, while the three sisters tell (in a series of three tapes) how they came to inspire a celebrated writer to compose his trilogy of novels, The Fates. And, of course, Where 3 Roads Meet is itself a more modest reduction of this imaginary trilogy, a triumvirate of fictions that presents to its own readers a place where three roads meet--three ways of exploring the sources and the fascinations of storytelling. (There are even more instances of such tripling, as readers of W3RM will discover.)

These days Barth is most often criticized for failing to "move past" the metafictional game-playing for which he has become perhaps the emblematic figure. But where, exactly, is he to go? Toward some more conventional kind of narrative strategy? Presumably he determined long ago that this was not the direction in which his talents would take him or he would never have abandoned conventional techniques in the first place. Moreover, to call self-reflexivity in fiction a matter of "game-playing" is to undervalue what metafiction is ultimately all about. There is an element of game-playing in John Barth's work--he wants his fiction to be entertaining, if not in the way stories are expected to entertain--but the self-reflexive gesture ("baring the device") is also the first and necessary step in establishing fiction as an aesthetic form whose limits are only the limits of language itself. Once we've acknowledged that a work of fiction does not require a suspension of disbelief, that its possibilities are not exhausted by the orthodox telling of tales, fiction as a literary form becomes that much more malleable, more open to other kinds of formal patterning.

Where 3 Roads Meet participates in this project in its modest way, allowing Barth to reinforce, through the cross-referential scheme I've described, more familiar metafictional devices with an intricate aesthetic design that balances the deconstruction of conventional narrative strategies and a simultaneous construction of alternative structures (much as Barth himself once posed the "literature of replenishment" against his previously elucidated notion of the "literature of exhaustion"). I would not claim that this is one of Barth's best books, although it might provide uninitiated readers with a pretty good introduction to his approach and assumptions. I would even agree with criticisms of Barth's late, mock-heroic style as a bit too mock- and more than a bit too mannered, as exemplified in a passage like this: "An upbeat, firm-willed, independent-spirited lass, be it said, who welcomed [her grandparents'] monitoring, took the loss of her not-much-of-a-mother in stride, comforted he not-all-that-bereft father as best a third- or fourth-grader can, and threw herself into her schoolwork, music lessons, team sports, and bosom-buddyhood with young Al Baumann. To whom she enjoyed mischievously displaying and even offering to his touch the not-yet-budding bosoms that anon would blossom into adolescent splendor.

No one will ever claim John Barth as either a plain stylist or a spinner of conventional yarns (although he does like to spin versions of yarns already spun). But that he is less than a conscientious writer concerned to enhance readers' appreciation of the art of fiction is an unsustainable argument.

Nattering On

When a writer has been an important literary presence for as long as John Barth (his first novel was published in 1956), and especially when his work has been as steadfastly unconventional as Barth's, it is no doubt inevitable that such a writer will provoke his share of reactionary, willfully ignorant criticism. In this regard, Ethan Gilsdorf's San Francisco Chronicle review of Barth's new collection of novellas, Where 3 Roads Meet, does not disappoint.

According to Gilsdorf:

When Barth finally gets on with the story and loses the postmodern soft-shoe routine, the "extended interruption-of-an-interruption" in "Tell Me" begins to build an engaging story. In spite of the tangents that get tangled in their own thought processes, the shock ending manages to deliver a punch. The reader is left wondering how much more poignant it could have been were the narrative less afraid to confront sentiment head-on.

A) Barth can't "get on" with his stories without the "postmodern soft-shoe routine" because performing such a routine is precisely his way of telling stories. Asking him to lose his "verbal pyrotechnics" and his "sef-consciousness" ("talking about the telling itself," as Gilsdorf clumsily puts it) is asking him to lose his authorial personality, his reason for telling stories in the first place. If you don't like Barth's approach to the writing of fiction--by which everyone has to agree that stories are all made up in the first place and that reflecting on how stories affect us is a satisfactory substitute for the "suspension of disbelief"--the appropriate response would be to read someone else, someone who won't "frustrate our expectations of conventional narrative," not to ask Barth to become a different kind of writer.

B) Barth doesn't do "poignant." At heart Barth is a comic writer, and all comic writers worth their joke-making will scrupuloulsy avoid the "poignant." The "poignant" is precisely the sort of thing comic fiction attempts to deflate. (And by "comic" here I mean the kind of comedy one finds in, say, Beckett, not in Garrison Keillor.) Neither Barth nor his postmodern colleagues have ever been writers to turn to if what you want is to "confront sentiment head-on." Again, to ask him to do this is to ask him to renounce what has always been an important part of the postmodern mission: to resist reducing fiction to the expression of cheap sentiment. (I know that some current writers, including David Foster Wallace, have wondered whether it is possible to infuse postmodernism with more "sentiment." My answer is "no," but then I don't understand why anyone would even think of blending the two. If you want to write sentimental fiction, just do it.)

Later, Gilsdorf ruminates:

Whether Barth is long lost in his own funhouse of verbal trickery, or is parched from a well of inspiration run dry, it's clear he's not changing. Still, "Where Three Roads Meet" raises useful questions: If a writer insists on (or is obsessed by) returning to the same themes and forms, must his readers remain impressed, or are they permitted to grow irritated? Does the author's knowledge that he's trying the reader's patience permit him to natter on?

"If a writer insists on (or is obsessed by) returning to the same themes and forms"? Well, now, in my reading of Shakespeare, of Dickens, the Romantic poets, Hawthorne, James, Thomas Hardy, Hemingway, Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, Yeats--actually of almost all serious writers still worth reading, I seem to find constant return to "the same themes and forms." Am I supposed to have grown "irritated"? Silly me. I just assumed that this was the mark of poets and novelists "obsessed" with the subjects that most interested them, that most strongly provoked their own powers of invention and led them to invest their "forms" with both imagination and authenticity. If I had only known they were just nattering on.

The Difficulties of the Fiction Market

Raymond Federman, author of the great postmodern novels Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It, now has a blog. This post, on the fate of his new novel, The Farm, is hilarious, discouraging, and enraging, all at the same time. If you think being a critically-acclaimed writer with umpteen published books, some of which literary history will surely judge as among the more important of their time, means you have a secure place in the "book business," this post will probably be enlightening. Here's a letter from an agent (with Federman's interpolations) commenting on The Farm:

Dear Raymond,

I'm very grateful for this opportunity to see The Farm. I really like it a lot and believe it will be published. [it would have been interesting, and perhaps even useful if Mitch at this point would have said why he loved the book and where he thinks it could be published]

Alas [well I like Alas better than just But], the difficulties of the fiction market [and now we have it – the pathetic predictable mercantile aspect of publishing] gets the better of me these days [poor Mitch -- maybe we could try to console him by writing a nice piece of shit] and even with books that I like [one is tempted to ask Mitch what kind of books he likes], I have a hard time placing them [maybe Mitch would have an easier time selling shoes or salamis in a delicatessen]. Even with the positive views that I did have for The Farm [Mitch could you please clarify what these positive views are so maybe I can feel good about them], I just didn't feel confident enough overall as to that right spot to suggest the possibility of getting together on it [perhaps Mitch should take a composition course to learn to write a decent readable English sentence before undertaking to peddle literature]. I just do know how many times that I have been off in the past and another will believe the opposite and set it right away [damn I wish Mitch had sent me this letter before I sent him The Farm -- I would have written him a warm decent rejection letter. Telling him that I didn't think he was the right agent for this book. I have no idea how such illiterate people become literary agents].

Thanks, again, and best to you for every success with The Farm. [I have no idea what that again is doing here, but I am deeply touched by Mitch's good wishes.]

Federman also tells us that Double or Nothing was rejected by 27 publishers, and that these are among the rejection notices he's received in the past:

we find this book too complicated for our readers
we think they are too many fucks in this book
we wouldn’t be able to sell more than 12 copies of this book
we cannot take a risk with such a postmodern novel
we could face a lawsuit with this book
we find this book totally unreadable
we find this book too narrow in scope
we think the characters need fleshing out
we think this book could use a good rewriting – it’s too short
we are tired of publishing books about the holocaust
we are looking for books that teach people how to improve their lives
we think your book would make the readers suffer
we think your book needs a happy ending
we think nobody gives a shit about the life of farmers in Southern France
we love the subject of your book but at the present time the relations between England and France being what they are we feel that your book would not receive favorable attention with the British reader.

Bridging Gaps

Scott Esposito describes this dilemma about as succinctly as it can be:

To a certain extent, however, doesn't innovation require that a book is actually read? It's all well and good if, say, 100 readers and writers collectively are at the forefront of literary innovation, but what is their work really worth if no one knows it exists? I'm all for authors snubbing the marketplace and coming up with great books that are like nothing I've read before. However, it seems to me that if their work is going to be meaningful in terms of changing the way novels are thought of, at some point readers and writers of experimental fiction need to bridge the gap to a mainstream audience.

I'm with Scott on this right up to those last words about bridging the gap to a "mainstream audience." Experimental fiction will never appeal to a "mainstream" audience. The very notion of the mainstream requires that there be practices that just don't belong there, that won't ever make their way to the center of the stream and will always be marginal to it, if not flowing in a different direction altogether. Attempting to take experimental fiction mainstream would only, in effect, cancel out its usefulness.

Of course some experiments in fiction eventually do make it to the mainstream, but usually only after great initial resistance and after enough time has passed that such experiments don't seem all that radical, indeed, seem to have always been among the writer's repertoire of available tricks. Modernist "stream of consciousness" now seems so unexeptional that a critic like James Wood can use it as a stick with which to thrash the postmodernists in an essentially conservative rearguard action, for example.

However, all fiction, even the most outrageously "innovative," does indeed need readers. More readers is better than fewer. However, they need to be the sort of readers for whom innovation in fiction is not just something to be occasionally tolerated, at best, but for whom experiment seems one of the indispensable tests of literature's vitality. Unfortunately, most readers seem to prefer the familiar and the conventional, and, in my opinion, it doesn't accomplish much to insist that these readers change their silly habits and read Beckett or Gaddis instead. This only produces backlash, something often enough inflicted on innovative fiction as it is. The readers who really value experimental fiction will keep it alive until additional interested readers--perhaps a generation later--seek it out. Beckett's fiction is an example. It's only just beginning to be appreciated.

What experimental fiction could use would be more sensitive readers among literary critics, critics who could do something useful toward "changing the way novels are thought of." (And I must say that I am seeing such sensitivity in a number of literary bloggers, among them Scott Esposito, another indication that litblogs may themselves manage to provide that "bridge" Scott speaks of.) Such critics would, ideally, not only make sure that potential readers of experimental fiction "know it exists," but would also attempt to explain why experimental fiction is not an aberration from or exception to literary history, but an inseparable part of that history. In other words, critics who see the value in experimental fiction would find ways to explain that they do so not out of contempt for the accomplishments of literature taken as a whole but from an understanding of them and a fundamental respect for what literature is capable of accomplishing. They would say of experimental fiction something like what Ron Silliman says of "language poetry," which is sometimes considered a wholesale rejection of the "poetic" tradition: "Langpo in this sense was hardly a break with anything. Rather, it was a selective re-envisioning of literary history – and possibility – bringing forward aspects of several tendencies, arriving (hopefully) at a new intersection not as any end point, but rather as an additional jumping-off place for still further, newer modes of art."

Showing Constraint

As regular litblog readers probably know (if you don't, you should), Derik Badman of MadInkBeard is probably the blogospheric expert on the "Oulipo" movement. According to the Oulipo Compendium,

The Oulipo - in full, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature - was founded in France in 1960 by the French author Raymond Queneau and the mathematical historian François Le Lionnais. Made up of mathematicians as well as writers, the group assigned itself the task of exploring how mathematical structures might be used in literary creation. The idea of mathematical structure was soon broadened to include all highly restrictive methods, like the palindrome and the sestina, that are strict enough to play a decisive role in determining what their users write. The most notorious example of this approach is Georges Perec's novel, A Void, written without a single appearance of the letter e.

Derik has focused more intensively on the literary use of "constraint": "A constraint can be syntactic, semantic, or formal. Syntactic constraints are by nature easier to define strictly than semantic constraints. Syntax is already a limited systematic field, while the semantic field is much broader. Because of this there has tended towards more syntactic constraints (lipograms, anagrams, and such). Formal constraints are often more obvious and less rigorous. None of these three categories are necessarily mutually exclusive." Anybody who has visited the MadInkBeard site will have seen both critical discussions of the use of such constraints in various contexts (including film) and also Derik's own ongoing fiction, "Premises in the Snow," which attempts to demonstrate the use of constraint.

I find all of this inherently fascinating, but I do have something of a problem with the breadth of application it sometimes seems to inspire. Thus, I'd like to pose a few questions about the potential utility of the concept of "constraint," to which I hope both Derik and anyone else interested in these issues might like to respond.

Most generally: How does "constraint" in literature fundamentally differ from what I have just generically called in several of my own posts "experiment"? Isn't most experimental fiction--from the modernists to Sorrentino or Barth--the deliberate adoption of some kind of what could loosely be called constraint? Joyce constrains himself to writing a novel whose "plot" can be paralleled with The Odyssey.
Nabokov constrains himself to the kind of story that can be "told" through a fictional poem and the annotations attached to it. Robert Coover limits himself in telling the story of one man's mental deterioration to what can be revealed through this man's interaction with an imaginary baseball game he invokes through rolling dice (a constraint within a constraint).

Is the technique of using constraint thus just another word for experiment or innovation in literature, is it a special subset of such experiments, or is it separate from this more "mainstream" experimentation altogether?

Further: Is constraint to be understood in essentially negative terms, as something that is held back or taken away? Does this assume conventions or conditions for literature that are more "normal" (or at least expected), from which the use of constraint is a departure? Or can constraints be considered as an affirmative act, an adding to, by which the writer demonstrates that fiction can be whatever we want it to be? Is such a writer actually illuminating the ways in which constraints can be taken simply as contributions to the open-ended repertoire by means of which literature can be "made"?

Finally, to what extent is it true that all works of literature involve constraint in their very terms of existence? A widely-held view of what motivates someone to write fiction or poetry--and I think this view can be challenged-- is that he/she has some vital concern or idea to express but has chosen to embody this idea indirectly in a work of literature rather than state it outright. This seems to be an initial constraint intrinsic to choosing literary form in the first place. Also, when a writer such as Chekhov (whom few people would call experimental) decides that, in effect, he'll write a kind of fiction that mostly sacrifices "plot" in favor of character or setting, is this a manifestation of constraint? Or when Beckett decides to write a kind of fiction that sometimes sacrifices character as we usually recognize it, is this constraint? And of course in choosing to write poetry of any kind, a poet agrees to "constrain" language to its use in artificial creations of sound and verse pattern. Is poetry as a whole the most salient exemplar of "contraint"?

For myself, I would say that perhaps the most ideal situation for writers and readers of literature would be when constraint, or any other device, is simply accepted as an example of the myriad kinds of devices a writer might put to use to compose a work of fiction or poetry. In other words, when it is acknowledged as that sort of thing the appearance of which in a piece of writing marks it as being literary to begin with.

Jumping Around

Two post-World War II novels that seem to me to belong to a tradition of "experimental fiction"--fiction that deliberately and self-consciously manipulates what are taken to be the established conventions of the form and thus provide a fresh perspective on the possibilities of the form--and that together perform a similar kind of experiment with traditional, linear narrative, are Nabokov's Pale Fire and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, the latter of which I have just re-read. In each case these novels jumble the order in which the parts of a prose narrative are expected to be related, each allowing the reader several different ways to put the narrative together in the process of reading it.

Pale Fire's initial gambit is to derive its "story" from the critical annotations to a poem presented as the novel's ostensible subject. The real story, however, emerges from the annotations themselves, shifting the focus to the circumstances and life-story of the annotator. But the annotations can be read either in the numbered order in which they occur, or one can follow the internal references and "jump around" in the notes until this buried narrative has been completely revealed. Hopscotch does something similar, offering up its story either as a series of linear episodes and an additional series of appended episodes and commentaries beginning roughly two-thirds of the way into the book, or as another version of the same story as revealed when read according to an alternative number map (the numbers of the episodes) provided by the author. One can "hopscotch" one's way through the text--as can be done with Pale Fire as well.

Thus, both novels offer the reader multiple perspectives on the core narrative, creating a kind of prismatic effect by which the narrative itself becomes less important and the way in which it can be put together, the way in which it can be "seen," takes precedence. In each, the underlying story remains the same, but the experience of reading it will be different depending on which route through it the reader chooses to take. Implicitly, each novel suggests to us that a story is just a story, but that the way it is told, the way it is constructed (in this case as much by the reader as by the author) is what finally matters--what finally contributes the "art" to literary art.

Stories are held in common by novels, plays, films, tv shows, video games. Surely it can't be the story alone, even if it is skillfully told, that commends a given work of fiction to us as worthy of our consideration. Most stories are, in fact, usually told with more immediacy of effect in these other forms than in novels and short stories. (My impression, as I have commented in previous posts, is that all too many current novels are written primarily under the hope they might eventually be made into movies. They are, in effect, movies presented through other means--certainly not through the belief that novels have a distinctive approach to story that can't be duplicated in movies.) A compelling narrative may hold one's attention during the process of its unfolding, but this in itself doesn't make it literature.

Experimental fiction does its job in reminding us of this fact. Sometimes, as is the case with both Pale Fire and Hopscotch, in doing so it also results in a fully satisfying work of literary art that will continue to stand up to subsequent readings by new generations of interested readers. At other times the experiment leaves us feeling it was interesting as an experiment, but didn' quite rise to this next level. (I would put John Barth's Letters in this category, for example, as well as Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves.) But we usually know when an author is attempting a literary experiment of the sort I am discussing, as opposed simply to trying out a new way of accomplishing an already existing set of familiar aesthetic goals--which is not, of course, itself something to be lightly dismissed.

Metafiction

At a time when the idea of self-reflexive art has become commonplace, if not itself a kind of established convention, it may be useful to reconsider the original appearance in contemporary literature of what came to be called "metafiction." Not only was this strain of American fiction--taken up by several different writers, in slightly different ways--probably the first of all of the contemporary arts (including the popular arts) to explore the possibilities of self-reflexivity, but arguably it was this approach to fiction that initially provoked the coinage of the term "postmodern" to describe it. Since both "metafiction" and "postmodern" have by now clearly become terms of abuse as much as descriptive labels, perhaps reexamining what the writers associated with the use of metafiction believed themselves to be up to might clarify what is still valuable about their work, as well as what the literary strategy involved still has to offer current and future writers of fiction.

As I wrote my own doctoral dissertation on the "rise of metafiction," I do feel I have a familiarity with the subject that is sufficiently informed that my comments amount to more than just superficial impressions or an unexamined enthusiasm. At the same time, I am not in this relatively brief post attempting a full-blown crtical analysis of metafiction. I hope merely to suggest that granting the original metafictionists some integirty in their literary goals and methods can only remind us why many serious, accomplished writers found various self-reflexive techniques to be, collectively, an aesthetically satisfying way both to follow up on the exploration of fiction's possibilities undertaken by the modernists and to create a then-contemporary mode of fiction that would in its own way capture the tenor of the times in which it was written. Perhaps this in turn would illuminate the further possibilities of metafiction--if any--current writers might find in it as fiction itself continues to define its place among other visual/narrative arts that feature "story" as their ostensible center of interest.

In my view, the foundational works of American metafiction are John Barth's story collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association (1968), as well as Coover's collection Pricksongs and Descants (1969). These books of course themselves show the influence of various precursors in the work of, among others, Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov, but finally they are the books that brought together most explicitly those characteristics of all previous fiction that work against simply producing transparent realism, that point the reader away from the unfolding narrative and toward the artificial devices by which all literary narratives are constructed and embellished. In so doing, Barth and Coover created a kind of "self-conscious" fiction that would decidedly--and perhaps irretrievably--alter perceptions of the role of convention in fiction.

In Barth's fiction, these conventions were challenged directly, in stories that blatantly reveal themselves to be fabrications, that examine self-reflexively the process and the tools of storytelling, that delight in all the contrivances and tricks that are involved in storytelling even as they acknowledge that such contrivances are always involved. Coover's fiction indulges in these sorts of diversions as well, although his work is perhaps more likely to explore the ways in which fiction and fiction-making incorporate, perhaps inevitably, elements of ritual and myth, as in UBA or "The Magic Poker," and to explode the conventions of realism and traditional narrative from within, to produce a kind of kaleidoscopic surrealism, as in "The Babysitter," rather than the comic anatomies of storytelling to be found in Lost in the Funhouse. (Although Barth is certainly interested as well in the mythic/ritual origins of storytelling.) But even as both Barth and Coover were seemingly set on demolishing the established conventions of narrative fiction, both also clearly revelled in storytelling and in finding new ways for stories to be "relevant" in a period of upheaval and radical change, as the 1960s clearly was.

Thus, metafiction was simultaneously an attempt to clear the ground of the remaining inherited presuppositions about the "craft" of fiction and to make possible a more unrestricted viw of what actually constitutes literary craft, to open up the ground for new practices that might expand fiction's potential range, that might even lead to a renewal of storytelling in new forms and styles. Most importantly, Barth and Coover went about this without sacrificing fiction's "entertainment" quotient. (In my opinion, at least.) The Universal Baseball Association is an engrossing read (even if you don't like baseball), "The Babysitter" an intensely compelling story despite the fact that what's "reallly going on" is impossible to determine. A story like Barth's "Menelaiad" is great fun to read, as long as you're willing to go along with its almost literally infinite regress of story-within-story. Other readers might not find them as entertaining as I do, perhaps, but that the authors meant them to be entertaining in their own way seems to me indisputable.

A list of subsequent metafiction of equal value and accomplishment would have to include William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), Gilbert Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) and Mulligan Stew (1979), as well as some of the work of Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman. These writers continued to ask questions not just about the conventions of fiction but about the very medium of writing, about the established usages of language itself. Gass and Sukenick play games with typography, Sorrentino adds to metafiction his outrageous humor and inveterate experimentation, Federman uses metafiction (or what he called "surfiction") to question the "reality" of reality. Taken together, they remain the literary touchstones of American metafiction. Their books may occasionally go out of print, but they will always be rediscovered because they still seem innovative despite the passage of time and the borrowing of their innovations by later writers.

By the 1980s a backlash of sorts had set in, both among other writers, who increasingly went for minimalist neorealism, and among critics, who increasingly called such fiction "self-indulgent" rather than "self-reflexive." Nevertheless, all of the metafictionists continued to write some very good books, and younger writers emerged who were clearly influenced by their earlier work. There are metafictional elements in the work of Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace, of Steve Stern and Steven Millhauser. A good deal even of Philip Roth's later work would clearly not have been the same without the prior efforts of the metafictionists. Other writers, from Michael Chabon to Ian McEwan and David Mitchell, would not necessarily be called metafictionists, but their books show a preoccupation with writing and with forms of storytelling that can be traced back to the related but different kind of preoccupation to be found in Lost in the Funhouse and The Universal Baseball Association.

However, the real promise of metafiction has not yet really been fulfilled. Its true legacy is to be found in the way it calls writers' (and readers') attention to the attributes of fiction as art, potentially making all of us more immediately aware of the limitless ways in which works of fiction can be shaped into artful verbal creations. Too often self-reflexive devices and strategies are still used simply as gimmicks, empty gestures, strategems employed by those wishing to appear clever and knowing. Not enough effort has been made to redeem the still latent possibilities of fiction when approached as an aesthetically malleable form waiting to be adapted to various imaginative purposes. (For an example of how one of the founding metafictionists is still able to do this, read Robert Coover's most recent novel, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre.) The unmitigated commercialism and careerism of the publishing "industry" as it now exists is not going to make this sort of effort more likely in the near future, nor will the disciplinary imperatives of academic creative writing, which mostly makes for the homogenization of product. But anyone who might like to strike out on a different path anyway, to understand how fiction might be freed of its encrusted layers of formula and routine, could do worse than to read (or re-read) the books and writers I have mentioned.

Caution!

Ron Silliman, a stalwart champion of what he calls "post-avant" writing, nevertheless has problems with what he calls in an equally colorful way "retro-avant-gardism," particularly the sort of poetry "that tends to employ new technology in order to generate post-rational texts, ranging from tossing dice to the latest in flash technology. I often feel that such writing is too in love with techné & not with the text, sort of an avant-gardism at all costs strategy. . . ." To put it another way, this kind of writing takes the "experimental" writer's concern with technique and reduces it to an expression of technology. This kind of approach, Silliman suggests, "is best practiced in moderation, for what it can teach about the limits of meaning & intention, not as the central project of anyone’s work."

I am and have long been myself a partisan of "experimental" or "innovative" fiction (choose your adjective), but, like Silliman, have always been less enamored of work that literally "exceeds the page," that takes the search for new forms of literary expression over the borders of literature itself into new media altogether. ("Multi-media," this endeavor was once called.) It is for this reason that I have never really been able to see the point of "hypertext" fiction--except, perhaps, as Silliman has it, as a way of instructing oneself about the "limits" of literary experiment, something that can be brought back to "the text" as a refreshment of purpose.

Even when a writer I greatly admire, Robert Coover, became rather a champion of hypertext, I just couldn't bring myself to take the thing seriously as literature because clearly enough it was no longer literature but something else, a new form of expression entirely, with it own separate, newly developing conventions and ambitions. I had no problem with the idea that this new form might coalesce into a new artistic mode of its own, in the same way cinema had done this, eventually, but since works of literature are aesthetic constructions of language, the spatial and visual qualities added by hypertext just seemed a different kind of practice. (After his initial experiments in hypertext, Coover himself came back with two of his best print fictions, Ghost Town and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, so perhaps the kind of reinvigoration I mentioned did occur in his case.)

Perhaps this is the bedrock of tradition that still underlies my more overt enthusiasms for experimental fiction. Once you abandon that tradition completely, you're no longer experimenting with the forms that interested you in the first place. There's not even anything left to challenge. John Barth once wrote that he was "of the temper that chooses to rebel along traditional lines." He preferred "the kind of art. . .that requires expertise and artistry as well as bright aesthetic ideas and/or inspiration." This Barthian kind of experimental fiction in turn could invoke a number of oxymoronic descriptions: "conservative radical"; "cautious iconoclast"; "pragamatic revolutionary." (I especially like the last one.) But in some ways it's only in the contradictions between these terms that actual experiment with literary form can take place. Or at least that's a way of thinking about it.