The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature

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• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136301742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

What is experimental literature? How has experimentation affected the course of literary history, and how is it shaping literary expression today? Literary experiment has always been diverse and challenging, but never more so than in our age of digital media and social networking, when the very category of the literary is coming under intense pressure. How will literature reconfigure itself in the future?

The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature maps this expansive and multifaceted field, with essays on:

• the history of literary experiment from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present
• the impact of new media on literature, including multimodal literature, digital fiction and code poetry
• the development of experimental genres from graphic narratives and found poetry through to gaming and interactive fiction
• experimental movements from Futurism and Surrealism to Postmodernism, Avant-Pop and Flarf.

Shedding new light on often critically neglected terrain, the contributors introduce this vibrant area, define its current state, and offer exciting new perspectives on its future.

This volume is the ideal introduction for those approaching the study of experimental literature for the first time or looking to further their knowledge.

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INTRODUCTION

Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale

I. What is experimental literature?

Experimental literature, as the contents of this Routledge Companion amply testify, is irreducibly diverse. Unfettered improvisation and the rigorous application of rules, accidental composition and hyper-rational design, free invention and obsessively faithful duplication, extreme conceptualism and extreme materiality, multimediality and media-specificity, being “born digital” and being hand-made – all of these, and many others, are ways of being experimental in literature. Despite this diversity, however, a number of common threads (some of which will be explored below) traverse experimental literary practice across the twentieth century and right up to the present. The one feature that all literary experiments share is their commitment to raising fundamental questions about the very nature and being of verbal art itself. What is literature, and what could it be? What are its functions, it limitations, its possibilities? These are the sorts of questions that “mainstream” literature, at all periods – commercial bestseller literature, but also the “classics” once they have been canonized, domesticated and rendered fit for unreflective consumption – is dedicated to repressing. Experimental literature unrepresses these fundamental questions, and in doing so it lays everything open to challenge, reconceptualization and reconfiguration. Experimentation makes alternatives visible and conceivable, and some of these alternatives become the foundations for future developments, whole new ways of writing, some of which eventually filter into the mainstream itself. Experiment is one of the engines of literary change and renewal; it is literature’s way of reinventing itself.

In the chapters that follow, the modifier experimental is used more or less interchangeably with avant-garde, and sometimes innovative. Though the terms function roughly synonymously, there are important nuances of difference in connotation, especially between experimental and avant-garde. Avant-garde begins its career in the military context, but then migrates to the political sphere, where the avant-garde is the faction that takes the lead ahead of the rest of a political movement (Calinescu 1987: 95–148). Consequently, aesthetic avant-gardism continues to be allied with political radicalism in a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic and literary movements. Experimentalism’s connotations, by contrast, are scientific. Experiment promises to extend the boundaries of knowledge, or in this case, of artistic practice. Strongly associated with modernity, it implies rejection of hide-bound traditions, values and forms. To call literature experimental is in some sense to aspire to compete with science – challenging science’s privileged status in modernity and reclaiming some of the prestige ceded by literature to science since the nineteenth century.

The language of experiment is a relative novelty in literary discourse, though if one were seeking deep historical roots one might venture as far back as the sixteenth century and Michel de Montaigne, who applied the term essais – in the sense of “try-outs” or “attempts” – to his unprecedented thought-experiments in prose. Subsequent centuries saw the emergence of literary forms that in hindsight we would surely be disposed to call “experimental” – the eighteenth-century novel, climaxing in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), is one example – but the model of scientific experiment would not become fully available for describing literary innovation until Émile Zola applied it to the naturalist novel at the end of the nineteenth century. The early twentieth-century avant-gardes – especially the Italian and Russian Futurists, and later the Surrealists – embraced the term enthusiastically, and it is largely thanks to them that we continue to regard unconventional, cutting-edge literature as “experimental,” and to associate the term with qualities of shock and affront, iconoclasm and difficulty.

In the last third of the twentieth century, avant-garde writers began to express certain reservations about the category “experimental,” which they viewed as dismissive, a way of segregating or ghettoizing innovative literature and preventing it from reaching an audience or infiltrating the mainstream. The British novelist B.S. Johnson, a restless innovator and intransigent avant-gardist, wrote that

“Experimental” to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful.” I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful: that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems.

(Johnson 1973: 19)

His American counterparts, the surfictionists Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick, shared Johnson’s suspicion of the category. Contending that “experimental” is a term that literary “middle-men” use to “brush aside” challenging literature, Federman writes that he does not

believe that a fiction writer with the least amount of self-respect, and belief in what he is doing, ever says to himself: “I am now going to experiment with fiction; I am now writing an experimental piece of fiction.” Others say that about his fiction. The middle-man of literature is the one who gives the label EXPERIMENT to what is difficult, strange, provocative, and even original … . Fiction is called experimental out of despair.

(Federman 1975: 7)

Sukenick’s view is that the term “experimental” belongs to the “ephemeral metalanguage” of the publishing industry, where it is “used to resolve contradictions between publishing as business enterprise and publishing as cultural institution.” In this metalanguage, he writes acerbically, “‘experimental novel’ … means something like ‘no sales of subsidiary rights’” (1985: 55).

These are cogent objections from writers with impeccable experimentalist credentials, whose reservations need to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, our hope is that the present Companion might go some way toward salvaging the term experimental, rescuing it from the contexts where it is a term of dismissal and condescension, and reinvigorating its connotations of edginess, renovation and aesthetic adventure.

II. The structure of this Companion

The volume is divided into eight sections arranged into three parts, the first of which is entitled The Historical Avant-Gardes. The opening section on modernist-era experimentalism introduces the key early and mid-twentieth-century movements that transformed the meaning of the avant-garde: Futurism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, and Existentialism and Absurdism. The next section turns to experimental innovations across Europe and the US in the period following World War II, whether in poetry (the New York School, the Beats), or prose (the nouveau roman, meta- and surfiction). The radical politics and techniques of Lettrism and Situationism are discussed here, along with the creative inventiveness of OuLiPo and proceduralism (or writing under constraints) generally. Many of the developments of this period can be brought together under the heading of postmodernism, a phenomenon that has proved notoriously difficult to define or locate chronologically. The third section of Part One discusses forms of experimental writing in which the notion of identity has been especially contested throughout the twentieth century – the female, African-American and postcolonial avant-gardes – before the final section of Part One examines attempts to put a stamp on the experimental contemporary, whether in the form of theoretical reflections and manifestoes, engagements with popular culture (Avant-Pop, post-postmodernism), wider cultural movements (globalization, altermodernism), or new forms of critical practice (post-criticism).

Part Two of the volume eschews a strictly chronological approach, focusing instead on innovation within and across genres. The first section concentrates mainly on poetic forms of experimentation and their influence on current practice, such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, concrete poetry, hoax poetry, found poetry and other forms of “uncreative writing,” and the poetry and other types of language used in visual art. The next section focuses on experiments with narrative and with fictionality more generally, with chapters on unnatural narration, impossible worlds, experimental life writing, and genre fiction and the avant-garde. The final section of this part considers ways in which the novel in particular has experimented in recent years with form and design, with attention to graphic novels, multimodal fiction, the incorporation of information design in the novel and printed interactive fiction. The third and final part of the volume comprises one section and turns to the impact that the digital age has had on experimental literature across media. Chapters on digital fiction, code poetry and new media, computer gaming, and virtual forms of autobiographical writing show the wide range and versatility of contemporary experimentation, and point to the ways in which the first years of the twenty-first century, like those of the twentieth, have been concerned with the radical possibilities opened up by new technologies.

III. The persistence of the historical avant-gardes

The idea of a “tradition of the new” ought to be paradoxical – surely anything truly new in culture should define itself in opposition to the traditional? – but that has not prevented people from talking about such a tradition since at least Harold Rosenberg’s (1959) book of that title. Indeed, it would be hard to deny that such a tradition exists, even if we leave out of account the kind of retrospective tracing of forebears that Jorge Luis Borges once described in his essay, “Kafka and His Precursors.” With the benefit of hindsight it is always possible, as Borges saw, to discover historical precursors of recent avant-garde practices in, say, Romantic irony, eighteenth-century metafiction, Renaissance formal inventiveness, and so on, back into the mists of time. It is a somewhat different matter, however, to recognize the direct genealogical connection between the historical avant-gardes of a hundred or so years ago and late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century experimentalism. The first of these ways of constructing a “tradition of the new” is retrospective, while the second acknowledges the persistence of a particular past in the present.

Many of the general features, and even some of the specific practices, of experimental literature of the second half of the century were anticipated by the avant-garde groups of the period from just before the Great War until the immediate aftermath of World War II, the epoch of the great isms of the early twentieth century, including Italian and Russian Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Expressionism, down to Existentialism and Absurdism (see chapters by White, Murphy, Stockwell and Gavins). Multi- and inter-media experiments, experiments with language, identity, visuality and the creative process, the embrace of transformative new technologies, the testing and transgression of the limits of artistic and social acceptability – all of these, and many other features of recent literary experimentalism, are prefigured by the historical avant-gardes. More than that, the very model of an avant-garde group, of what it is and does – group formation and internal politics, identity and “branding,” manifestoes, self-promotion and propaganda – derives from the early twentieth-century isms.

These models of experimental practice and group behavior are in some cases embraced by later literary experimentalists and adapted to their own uses, in other cases resisted, but they can rarely if ever be ignored. Thus, for example, it is easy to trace the influence of the early twentieth-century French and Russian avant-gardes on the New York poets of the 1950s and 1960s (see Lee, this volume), and that of Dada and Surrealist practice on the “uncreative writing” and Flarf poetics of the 1990s and the new millennium (see Epstein, this volume). Conversely, it is just as easy to see how groups as diverse as the French New Novelists and the Tel Quel circle, the Lettrists and Situationists, and the OuLiPo group all defined themselves in opposition to their Surrealist and Existentialist predecessors (see Marx-Scouras, Miller, and Baetens, this volume). Both tendencies – both the reclamation of certain aspects of the modernist-era avant-gardes and wariness toward other avant-garde tendencies of the same era – can be detected in the poetics and politics of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (see Bernstein, this volume). For better or worse, the life and work of the historical avant-gardes seem to have been incorporated into the very DNA of the experimental literature that has come after them.

The persistence of the historical avant-garde into the present guarantees a sort of family resemblance among the contemporary varieties of experimentalism. As with real families, resemblance here is not a matter of everyone possessing some essential feature common to all types of experimentalism; rather, it involves a series of overlapping similarities – common threads, which connect subsets of experimental practices. Some of the common threads that we have detected among the experimental practices surveyed in this volume are outlined below; no doubt the reader will find others.

IV. Some common threads

After the historical avant-gardes: postmodernism

Postmodernism, whatever it may be – a period, style, literary movement, or cultural condition – is, by its very name, seen as a successor to the historical avant-gardes and, more specifically, to modernism. And yet, as Brian McHale points out, “nothing about the subject is certain, resolved, or uncontentious.” Questions of the when, how, and why of postmodernism loom unanswered. Furthermore, postmodernism’s ambiguous politics and debatable relationship to popular culture pose an even greater question: Is the literature of the postmodern experimental at all? It is precisely this controversial topic that McHale raises in his essay for the volume, first recalling the unsettled dispute on the matter between philosopher J.F. Lyotard and architecture critic Charles Jencks, who advocated a postmodern experimentalism rooted in modernism and a postmodern eclecticism associated with the popular, respectively. For McHale, there are two key tropes of postmodern literature that complicate each side of the argument: the process of world-modelling and the presentation of an unpresentable textual sublime.

True to the spirit of postmodernism, McHale ultimately refuses to pit the experimental and the eclectic against each other in a straight dichotomy. Similarly, Elana Gomel in her discussion of popular genre fiction (itself a progeny of the postmodern) interrogates the absolute segregation between genre fiction as low art and the avant-garde as high art. As she says in the opening words to her essay, rather “Two trains collide.” Concentrating on the popular genres of fantasy, science fiction and horror, Gomel shows that, like postmodern literature, avant-garde genre fiction is concerned with the creation of new worlds and exploration of ontological arenas, particularly through devices of allegory, displacement, and incoherence. However, while post-modern works often rely heavily on parody and pastiche, avant-garde genre works “create new fictional spaces that attempt to resurrect/reconstruct history, and in doing so, question their own role as commodities.”

Focusing on writing of the present, both Liam Connell in his discussion of the literature of globalization and Alison Gibbons in her account of altermodenist fiction suggest that contemporary experimental novels exhibit a heightened awareness of the value of commodities in the international market place. The literature of globalization explores themes of “complex connectivity,” the numerous and sometimes intertwined modes of social interaction available today, and the ways in which these interactions produce a perceived sense of “proximity.” In exploring these themes, such literary experiments also trouble them, highlighting “the interplay between local and global as mutually interpenetrating forms.” In doing so, time and space become intertwined. The concatenation of time and space is one of the commonalities shared by the literature of globalization and altermodernist fiction. Gibbons’s account of altermodernism, which stems from the writings of art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, identifies three central tenets of fiction of this period: the representation of time as a spatialized landscape, the conceptualization of identity as nomadic, and the integration of genres and modes. Both altermodernist fiction and the literature of globalisation are interested in “networks” – temporal-spatial, formal, intersubjective and ontological. Moreover, both have subversive intent,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The Historical Avant-Gardes
• Part II Experiment now Printed matter
• Part III Experiment now Beyond the page
• Index