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Renaissance of the Weird: Experimental Fiction as the New American Normal

John domini on amber sparks, percival everett, laura van den berg, lance olsen, paul beatty, karen russell, and more.

So you pick up a New Yorker short story, hoping to find something fresh. Here’s one that seems to have gotten a lot of attention, “The Ghost Birds,” by Karen Russell. In no time you find yourself spellbound, swept up in a world where no one would want to live, a near-future biosphere so toxic it’s killed off all the birds. Gloomy stuff indeed, and yet you turn pages or swipe screens fascinated, compelled in large part by the sheer strangeness.

Russell will kick off a section with an arresting line like “To be a kid requires difficult detective work,” thereby opening an alternative point of view for which the only correlative might be the children’s barracks at Auschwitz. She’ll interrupt the narrative with lists of the bird species lost, or with flashbacks so compelling, they could be whole novels in thumbnail: “The fires spread to every continent. The air turned a peppery orange, making each unfiltered breath a harrowing event.” At the story’s climax, things turn supernatural, decidedly ambiguous, and to confirm the outcome, you need to reread a fleeting earlier reference or two.

A magnificent piece of work, “The Ghost Birds” depends—for its impact—on stretching, not to say manhandling, the fictional form. It bears little resemblance to what’s generally considered “a New Yorker story,” the strained domesticity of contributors from John O’Hara to Ann Beattie. At the same time, despite its future tech and apocalyptic apparatus, Russell’s piece doesn’t feel right for, say, Fantasy & Science Fiction . It achieves both emotional sting and political savvy (a harsh critique of capitalism) beyond what’s generally considered SF turf, the materials of Asimov and Bradbury.

But then again, who cares what’s “generally considered?” Don’t perceptions like that always wind up off-base, whether the subject’s the New Yorker or F&SF ? These days, Hugo and Nebula winners claim the proud heritage of George Orwell and Mary Shelley, and many prefer to call their genre “spec-fic,” if not “cli-fi.” That last category, fiction about the climate crisis, seems the best fit for Russell’s splendid work⎯insofar as it needs a fit.

“Ghost Birds” succeeds by defying any such demands, disrupting the norms of dramaturgy, and so makes an excellent introduction to my larger point. I’d argue that nothing so animates contemporary American novels and short stories as the spirit of experiment. Experimental fiction is flourishing, as we near the century’s quarter-mark, in a way this country has rarely if ever seen.

The evidence lies scattered far and wide, so easy to spot that I’m baffled by how little critics have noticed. Granted, the term “experimental” still turns up, most often applied to esteemed elders like Don DeLillo. Yet the same energy crackles, unmistakably, in a good many talents now in mid-career, if not just hitting their stride.

The outstanding case in point would be Colson Whitehead; the novel that may rank as his most celebrated, The Underground Railroad, also presents his wildest Rube Goldberg contraption. And Whitehead hardly stands alone. Even setting aside the so-called Afrofuturists, like N.K. Jemisin and her alternative worlds, many of the recent knockout fictions from Black Americans display a glittering eccentric streak. You spot it even in texts very different from Whitehead’s, like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) . Then there’s the prolific Percival Everett, lower profile but always in some way iconoclastic.

Naturally, the phenomenon is more common in the smaller independent houses, like Fiction Collective 2, Two Dollar Radio, or Dzanc. Among these, Lance Olsen would be the exemplar, now into his third decade of narrative chimera. But a number are with commercial houses, among them some of the country’s most exciting women authors. Alongside Russell, I’d put Amber Sparks and Laura van den Berg.

In short, there’s a lot of activity. Naturally, it hasn’t spread everywhere or changed everything. Telling your story strangely, in a literary culture of such variety, has by no means become the only way for an American to work. Still, an awful lot of writers are embracing the strange, impatient with established standards and practices. I daresay such titles dominate the New Fiction shelves these days, and certainly the work has won notice, including more than a few awards. Still, no one has stood up to raise a shout, a salute, and this leaves it up to me, I suppose⎯a toast to our Renaissance of the Weird.

More than celebration, to be sure, my essay intends illumination. I’ll start abroad, in Europe particularly, considering how it treats narrative rowdiness, and then I’ll draw out the contrast to the situation Stateside, our long-troubled relationship with such work. Once I’ve established that difference, that history, I’ll return to the contemporary, a range of unfettered homegrown talents. That range is remarkable, as I say⎯vineyards of every terroir have produced stunning varietals⎯and demands exploration of its roots, its reasons. That’s where I’ll end, with the question of Why now?

Now, over on the Continent, this wouldn’t be news. Paris and Berlin reclaimed their place on the cutting edge following the last World War, and European fiction has sprouted all sorts of wild hairs, whether by Alain Robbe-Grillet in the 1950s or Jenny Erpenbeck this past decade. Other pertinent names would fill several pages in Oulipo format, with paste-ins and marginalia, and the emotional range would run from the sourpuss Thomas Bernhard to the upwardly striving Bernardine Evaristo.

Naturally, more straightforward narrative has seen its champions as well. The latest is Elena Ferrante, with her Marxist economics and family sorrows. If any Italian since Dante can match that woman’s stature, however, it’s Italo Calvino, so radical an imagination that his Invisible Cities (1972) invented a fresh form for the novel. Reframing narrative, as Cities did, may provide the best handle on the recent European contribution to the artform. Other primary shape-shifters would include Beckett and Sebald.

The effort to construct a nouveau roman also energizes a good deal of the fiction out of the former European colonies. Again, the list could go on and on, but consider that India gave us the protean Salman Rushdie, Central Africa Alain Mabanckou, with his shaggy supernatural tales, and Oman (formerly a British “protectorate”) the Booker-winner Jokha Alharthi. Her novels are garnished with original poetry and hopscotch across a century of women’s lives.

For an American, it would seem only natural to venture something similar: to risk, at least once in a while, getting lost in the funhouse. I’m citing John Barth, of course, his watershed innovation from 1967, and among more recent US novelists, at least one went out of his way to pay that story homage. David Foster Wallace, rather a turn-of-the-millennium rock star, made free use of Barth’s Funhouse , the book as well as its title piece, in his ’89 novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” DFW’s story bogs down badly, it must be said, but the set in which it appears, Girl With Curious Hair, includes one or two of his most dazzling, and these reference previous experiments other than Barth’s. Throughout his too-brief career, this author honored his elders, the writers generally known as “the Postmoderns.”

Yet even as he brought off his own provocative spec-fic, Wallace took care to set it apart from the work of these same predecessors. In interviews he worried that novels and stories like Barth’s could be “enervating,” especially in their tendency to self-commentary, or meta-fiction. Misgivings like that come with the territory, part of any artist’s response to another, but what Wallace had to say was angrily amplified by his colleague Jonathan Franzen. The author of The Corrections has always subscribed to a more accessible model for fiction, and he defended it at length in a 2002 New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult”⎯otherwise an unforgiving takedown of William Gaddis, perhaps the greatest of the Postmoderns.

Franzen’s complaints were far from the first. Attacks on the freaks of US fiction go back to their freaky heyday, what you could call the Postmodern moment. This lasted about five years, roughly the first half of the 1970s, and the rock star of the group was Donald Barthelme. If New Yorker norms were sabotaged, Barthelme was the culprit, and he drew major media attention while sharing a girlfriend with Miles Davis (see the biography Hiding Man ). During those same years, too, Barth, Pynchon, and Gaddis each took home a National Book Award. But as they enjoyed the limelight, others sat grumbling in the dark.

An early reprisal came from Gore Vidal, who in “American Plastic” (1976) wielded his usual viper’s tongue. As for an argument, that was largely absent, but then John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction (1980) had even less to say, while serving up more vitriol. This book got some traction⎯Gardner, like Vidal, could write powerfully⎯but it’s little more than an executioner’s roll call: the Righteous and the Damned. The latter included even Gardner’s friend William Gass, sent to the block for seeking fictional alternatives.

To be sure, Gass and the rest of the condemned had their defenders; these days, Barthelme’s in the Library of America. Nevertheless, the beat-down went on for decades; first Tom Wolfe grabbed a cudgel (“The Billion-Footed Beast,” ’89), then Franzen. The attacks came with such regularity, and sounded so similar, it’s hard not to think of Puritanism, its lingering chill. The ripple effect was withering; the lascivious biplay of Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1968), for instance, would get bumped off the syllabus or out of the anthology, while there was always space for the bleak monosyllables of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk about Love” (‘81).

Surely an argument can be made for both sorts of stories, but in the US this was largely lacking until 2008, when Zadie Smith published her splendid and clarifying essay, “Two Paths for the Novel.” Still, even now, the more crooked and crazy path may be marked CLOSED. In recent weeks, I’ve heard a talented and well-published writer claim that, in the offices of Manhattan publishing, “anything experimental” will get “combed out” of a manuscript. I’ve read the sensitive critic Ron Charles, in his review of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House , disdainful about her playfulness: “A second-person narrator? You shouldn’t have.” Recently I’ve witnessed the recent Twitterstorm, the thunder rumbling on both sides of the issue, after journalist Ben Judah called for, well, moral fiction: for “the great society novels” of the past, “the Zolas, Balzacs, Austens, Tolstoys….”

Whether prompted by our grim-faced forefathers or the smirking Gore Vidal, the US critical establishment developed a discomfort with the label “Postmodern.” These days, a text like Gaddis’ JR (1975) might instead be called a “systems novel.” The systems in question are the larger controlling forces of our lives, and certainly JR makes a good example; it turns us all to hamsters on the wheel of Big Finance. Still, this handle too proves slippery. I first encountered the expression in Tom LeClair’s work on DeLillo ( In the Loop , 1988), and in Libra (’88) or Underworld (’97), doesn’t “the system” carry guns? CIA, FBI, Mafia?

More recently, the NYTBR review of Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2022) called it a systems novel, and in Whitehead’s imagination, it’s race that holds the reins. The Prime Mover, the source of our troubles, provides a central subject of any good drama, after all. That includes social realism like Ferrante’s. What’s more, to insist that a single purpose unifies all the new American efforts to bend and fold the fictional form⎯doesn’t that violate the very project?

DeLillo’s case tells us something, since he wears the dual descriptors of Postmodern and systems novelist. Critical consensus holds that the man’s peak came a while back, with the brilliant run from Libra to Underworld , while the 21st-Century work is regarded, by and large, as a letdown. Michiko Kakutani of the Times gave Falling Man (2007) her Imperial thumbs-down, declaring it “spindly” and “inadequate.” Even DeLillo himself, when he relents to an interview, will admit he’s no longer writing the way he used to. Beyond that, to be sure, the man remains cagey, and yet any objective comparison between his latest half-dozen and their honored predecessors at once reveals the salient difference.

The work since Body Artist (‘01) is more experimental . Their materials tend to the surreal; Zero K (’16) even tosses in a voice from the dead⎯or is it the undead? Their central action tends to totter off-center, and as for “systems,” most of the protagonists drift at a level of comfort that leaves the question moot. The author has left the ballpark, the sweat and grit so essential to Mao II (1991) and “Pafko at the Wall.” Instead, he’s going for shadow, suggestion, myth. Whether that makes for great fiction is another question, to be sure, but if you ask me, whichever muse inspired Cosmopolis, (‘03) she’s a magical seductress. I’d call that one a fable of renunciation: the Emperor strips off his own clothes.

Insofar as DeLillo belongs in any New Wave, though, he’s its gnomic Elder. Among the younger and more approachable are writers like Laura van den Berg and Amber Sparks. Again, these two are but a small sample; forerunners include Aimee Bender, who’s spent a quarter-century reinventing the fairy tale; newer on the scene would be Missouri Williams. Her debut The Doloriad (a title that recalls Barth) presents a post-apocalyptic society to make your hair stand on end⎯as do some of the imagined futures in Sparks and van den Berg. Find Me (2015) , van den Berg’s first novel, takes place in a US devastated by a memory-destroying plague. “The Men and Women Like Him,” from Sparks’ 2016 collection The Unfinished World , depicts the unexpected agonies of a civilization that’s figured out time-travel.

Of the two, Sparks is the more ostensibly out there. Her three collections are full of specters, witches, and old gods reborn. She makes mischief with form and language, too; stories sprawl “like some strange, bloody, chaotic plant,” and several wouldn’t look out of place in an Escher exhibit. Yet if Sparks is playing tricks, the joke’s on us. Her fictions are animated by a prickly social consciousness, one you sense in the very title of her splendid latest, And I Do Not Forgive You (2020). One of that book’s best, “Everyone’s a Winner at Meadow Park,” may be a ghost story, but its howls are those of the downtrodden.

As for van den Berg, her materials are more down to earth, but nonetheless spooky. In her 2018 novel The Third Hotel , a recent widow winds up seducing her husband’s ghost⎯in Cuba, where she’s gone on dubious pretenses. In “Karolina,” from her 2020 collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears , the ghost confronting another solo voyager is estranged family, half-crazy yet something of a Cassandra. Van den Berg sets all her women eerily adrift; even a dreary apartment complex can seem “a kind of purgatory where we docked until our souls were called elsewhere.”

And as in Sparks, these elements feel feminist: a demonstration of how quickly and callously women can be stripped of care and support. The resulting riddle of identity, van den Berg’s abiding conundrum, finds vital expression in wild verb coinages. A woman doesn’t just sigh over how close she and her friends used to be; “We wept secrets,” she mourns. “We eavesdropped nightmares.”

The displacement that haunts these young women feels very 21st-century. It’s the uneasiness of the refugee, really, a defining trauma for our time, and widespread in this country. On America’s margins, hardscrabble cultures express their turmoil in all sorts of novels and stories, and some of the best-known are the most unconventional. Viet Thanh Nguyen fled Vietnam as a child, and his violent, comedic refashioning of his bicultural experience, in The Sympathizer (2015), won the Pulitzer. The Cherokee writer Brandon Hobson has clearly studied Louise Erdrich’s crazy quilts of Lakota culture; his The Removed (2021) includes whole chapters of dissociative nightmare.

The dread has seeped into mainstream cultures as well. The fictions of Sparks or van den Berg look like cases in point, but a more striking one would be Lance Olsen, plainly of Northern European extraction and raised, as he puts it in his memoir [[there]] (2014), in a “bland foliaged suburb” of New Jersey. Nevertheless, his fiction (as well as his mélange of a memoir) has focused more and more on men, women, and the occasional monster who’ve lost their bearings. Some are bushwhacked by fate, flailing but most likely done for, while a few others rush headlong towards self-destruction. In every case, though, the text in which they turn up looks outrageous.

“Experimental writing,” as most people conceive the term, suits Olsen’s work better than that of all the writers I’m discussing. Percival Everett might object, but even he would admit Olsen has birthed some mooncalves, his typography all over the place and even the books themselves, in a case like the double-sided Theories of Forgetting (2014), oddly configured.

Those two authors also share a breathtaking prolixity. I’ll be getting to Everett, and Olsen’s latest, Skin Elegies (2021), brings his bibliography to thirty titles, mostly novels. Lately, these have asserted a fresh power. The author’s recent saturation in European culture, in particular his sojourns in Berlin, has deepened his sensitivity to human precariousness. Nothing so gnaws at his people, in these teeming later fictions, as the awareness “that every meeting is / the origin of a leaving.” The quote is from a Fukushima survivor, in Skin Elegies , texting about her harrowing escape. The entire novel teeters on the verge of death, in Fukushima, on the doomed shuttle Challenger , in a Swiss euthanasia clinic, and elsewhere. Each setting has its own layout and style, too, from lines of text to stream of consciousness.

Collage also provides the form in Olsen’s previous, My Red Heaven (2020), though the elements of this composition are very different, in keeping with a very different narrative surrogate. Red Heaven takes place over a single day in Berlin, 1927, and visits with everyone from Goebbels and Hitler to Kafka’s late-life wife Dora (a Jew who escaped the Holocaust, the novel reminds us) and the obscure and struggling Walter Benjamin (a Jew who didn’t get out; the novel flashes forward to his suicide). These and many others are all caught in the evanescence, the superlunary glow just before an eclipse; all suffer the giddiness Benjamin jots down in 1927, sounding as if it’s already 1940 and he’s taken his fatal dose of pills: “ I’m falling in love with my lostness.”

Olsen may have more powerful novels⎯ Calendar of Regrets (2010), possibly. Nevertheless, My Red Heaven and Skin Elegies stand like twin peaks worthy of the David Lynch reference: story-substitutes no one else could’ve brought off, and yet in their shock, life-giving.

Colson Whitehead has delivered plenty of shocks as well, though his apparatus doesn’t look so abnormal. Regardless of how he ranks as a rulebreaker, though, Whitehead’s into a stretch as stunning as DeLillo’s in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Nickel Boys (2019) may have picked up more awards than Underground Railroad, I can’t keep track, and Harlem Shuffle has so far done splendidly. More pertinent for this essay is how the most recent novels tame the author’s wild streak.

Both books present the America we know all too well, where anyone born the wrong color contends with Sisyphean economics and due process, and both keep their chronology straightforward. Granted, the three linked sequences of Shuffle conceal a trompe l’œil or two, and Nickel Boys has a metafictional aspect, with its constant notetaking and rumor-sharing. Even shackles tell a story: “The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep…. Testifying.” Still, when I call Whitehead a champion of the New Eccentrics, I’m thinking primarily of the work that began with his debut The Intuitionist (’99)⎯no doubt the world’s only novel of mystic elevator repair⎯and culminated in The Underground Railroad.

The narrative of Whitehead’s masterpiece depends on an imaginative leap now known to any Goodreads user, but previously unseen outside of steampunk: an actual refugee railway deep in the earth. Whitehead’s invention does largely without nuts and bolts, too, it’s dreamy around the edges, so that the lone correlative I think of comes in Song of Solomon, with its climactic discovery that “the people could fly.”

Certainly, Toni Morrison presides like fertile Demeter over the contemporary efflorescence of Black literature, but Whitehead takes risks all his own. He’ll apply a refined rhetorical balance to inhuman abuse: “the travesties so routine and familiar that they were like weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them.” He’ll adopt perspectives as antiphonal as an escaped slave and a “slave catcher,” also putting each viewpoint though acute reversals. Stories so far apart yet so entwined come to embody a core insight: “truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated… when you weren’t looking.” If there’s anything that can resist that manipulation, it’s the supernatural journey underground: “the miracle beneath. The miracle you made with your own sweat and blood.”

I could go on pulling citations, but Whitehead’s accomplishment is best appreciated not in its parts but as a whole⎯a novel. This one had forerunners (one thinks also of Ellison’s Invisible Man ), but Underground Railroad offers such a ride, bruising and mind-blowing, it creates a fresh model for imagining the tormented history of race.

Among the texts that share the model, a signal case would be Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Jessamyn Ward’s unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, to be sure, and her story’s set largely in the present. I doubt any of the novel’s rave reviews termed it “experimental.” Nevertheless, in this case too, the Deep South is a place of ghosts, with many a wrinkle in time.

Yet while the same shadows fall across a number of recent texts, Whitehead’s historical revisionism is by no means the rule, in Black fiction these days. No neighborhood in America is monolithic, anymore, and this applies on the aesthetic fringes as well. Both Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) and Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021) rival Underground Railroad for praise, but they upend expectation in very different ways. Both honor a different ancestor, the acerbic Ishmael Reed, whipping up horror and satire very much of the moment. When Beatty imagines a Black man calling for the reinstatement of slavery, or Solomon a bisexual teen mother who defends herself by turning into a monster, these wild developments bristle with insight. And for still greater diversity within this writing community, check out the lengthening shelf of titles from Percival Everett.

Novels make up the majority of his work, and altogether, they display a carnivalesque flexibility. Even when Everett observes Aristotelian unities, he knocks them out of whack. A few titles, however, rival the Postmoderns at their most radical, and one of those ranks among his most celebrated: Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013).

The novel’s all stories within stories, with new hybrids sprouting just as you’d got the hang of the last. Most are sprinkled with nonsense rhymes or literary allusions, and these yield, in turn, yet more stories. The sheer imagination compels the reading, that and the way each whirling prose dervish puts a fresh spin on our mortality. The dedication is to the author’s late father, and the novel opens on a father in assisted living, in halting conversation with his son. Even the more surreal images convey a chill: “We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead.”

Near the end, a mathematical formula appears, and while I’ve no idea what it means, I do see that it features the infinity symbol, and that it brackets, at beginning and end, a brief, berserk chapter. This begins: “The real question was whether there was some real value to which all of this, all of our naming, thinking, speaking, breathing, wanting, loving, lusting….” The three pages that follow (and close with the math widget) are nothing but present participles: the linguistic formula which signifies life.

An alternative fiction without parallel, if you ask me, Percival Everett also prompted the actual Everett to yet another surprise. His followup, So Much Blue (2017), works with rhetoric and sequencing you might call commonplace. The recollections of an aging painter, its identities remain stable and its prose solid Strunk & White. While interactions can get extreme, they’re never impossible; people even speak between quotation marks. Yet the text juggles its narratives oddly, keeping secrets that any ordinary drama would have to let out of the bag, and the resolution has an unsettling ambivalence. Besides that, So Much Blue shares with its predecessor something crucial about the protagonists. The men are Black (the father too, in the earlier novel), but this doesn’t much matter. The character’s color is never germane to any of the plotlines.

Now, this author has by no means ignored the subject, over his career. In 2009, I Am Not Sidney Poitier had a nasty laugh at what white folks expect from Black literature, and his latest, The Trees , exacts bloody new revenge for the murder of Emmett Till. Overall, though, Everett’s fiction isn’t yoked to the torments of racism. Rather, his project keeps raising further questions, wanting, loving, lusting… experimenting.

Which leaves him in excellent company, nowadays. Busy company, at that: with each succeeding book season, Americans of all backgrounds and orientations are finding new ways to warp Freytag’s Triangle. Naturally, their gathering momentum by no means steamrolls over the sturdy old structures of character and catharsis, rising action and climax. Nor is the structures’ toolkit, with items like scrupulous observation and psychological acuity, in danger of rusting. So long as novels matter, there will always be a place for Edward P. Jones or Mary Gaitskill. By the same token, if the alternatives are enjoying a Renaissance, sooner or later it’ll confront its Savonarola, building bonfires of the vanities. Some of the writers I’ve praised might even take as bad a pasting as the Postmoderns.

That earlier backlash, from which the dust still hasn’t settled, does seem one of the prompts for the current eruption. Smart young writers aren’t oblivious to what their culture approves and forbids, and inevitably, the outcasts start to look intriguing. Then too, MFA workshops have grown notorious for how they rein in the high-kickers, insisting grimly on ”show don’t tell” and “less is more.”

Even Lan Samantha Chang, director at Iowa, has complained about the constraints. She’s mounted her own small rebellion, too, this year in The Family Chao . But all that’s mere literature, how it’s taught, read, and critiqued. Art remains a response to the whole world, not just its texts, and for any Stateside talent born since the Baby Boom, our world suffers a terrible need for new perceptions and configurations. A hundred years after “The Waste Land,” hasn’t the devastation grown worse? Isn’t the air full of ghost birds? Aren’t streets crowded with the displaced? Then why not⎯to cite other milestones from the same earlier ‘22⎯ dream up a new Ulysses , or “The Hunger Artist,” or À la recherche du temps perdu ?

To think in such terms, to set whole centuries in balance, takes you to the issue of ultimate value. You wonder where, on the scales of human storytelling, the needle might land for an Amber Sparks, a Paul Beatty. But that’s another question, though a perfectly good one. I mean, it’s still America. But this is still American fiction⎯that’s my point. This is our own witching hour, full of strange cries and peculiar apparitions, and that seems to me worth a drink. It’s not nothing to once more show the world that this artform just can’t be contained.

John Domini

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The Best Fiction Books » Contemporary Fiction

The best experimental fiction, recommended by rebecca watson.

little scratch by Rebecca Watson

Experimental fiction often uses unusual forms of syntax, style, or form—perhaps taking the form of fragments, footnotes or parallel narratives. Here Rebecca Watson , author of the critically acclaimed experimental novel little scratch , recommends five of the best experimental novels and explains why a writer might choose to bend the rules—and to what effect.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Diary of a Bad Year by J M Coetzee

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

1 When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy

2 the lesser bohemians by eimear mcbride, 3 between the acts by virginia woolf, 4 diary of a bad year by j m coetzee, 5 dept. of speculation by jenny offill.

T hanks for joining us on Five Books to discuss five of the best examples of experimental fiction. Could you tell us about your own novel little scratch , and its formal invention?

I guess the book is about the way that consciousness works; more specifically, present tense immediacy. That kind of consciousness. I think that it began with the challenge of feeling that prose does not really represent the bombardment and overwhelming simultaneity of everyday live experience. There’s so much going on. But when we write prose, we have this very neat, linear way in which we inhabit a moment. So my challenge was to represent the opposite of that on the page. Trauma can hyper-sensitise the ordinary, so it gave the experiment an extra charge.

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I split the page into channels. It breaks into two or three columns, goes between prose and half-prose. As you go down the page, you pass through time, and you have the internal, the external—sensory information, what you hear, what you smell—and how they, essentially, conflict with but also inform each other. It was kind of a game of association.

One of the things I found so interesting about it, and accurate—at least, according to my own experience of moving through the world—is how the interior monologue can be the defining element of a day. A theatre of drama, or conflict, when outwardly nothing is really happening. But as well as this issue of trauma it also struck me that your book was also fun , in how imaginative it was and how it told little jokes to itself. Do you think that’s important in experimental fiction, that sense of play?

Although perhaps ‘play’ is not the right word for the first book we’re going to discuss? This is When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy. It’s about quite extreme domestic abuse; a woman marries an Indian intellectual who uses his ideas “as a cover for his own sadism.”

Um, actually I think you can use the word play. It’s uncomfortable, but the beauty of what she does is that she takes an incredibly disturbing centrepiece—this abusive marriage—and turns it into a creative challenge, and a performance.

It’s fiction, with an unnamed first-person narrator, and the narrator is telling the story retrospectively, about five years after these few months of marriage. It’s about how to tell the story: how do you go back and look at something so invasive, so encompassing, while reclaiming, or asserting, your sense of self.

“Experimental writing needs an openness and willingness from a reader, to go beyond what you might be used to”

What is the centre of the book is a playfulness about what it is to be a writer, and what it is to live a life—how we write narratives. And she has this very playful voice that shifts and flirts and diverts. It moves in lots of different registers.

I don’t think it looks experimental on the page. It’s the shifting register that makes it feel really, really new. Kandasamy studies the different vehicles of how to tell a story. The novel moves between prose poetry, to bits where it’s like a Q&A. The narrator is simultaneously the actor who breaks the fourth wall, and the writer dictating the stage directions. So even though we’re looking at this abusive marriage, most of the time this person is almost testing you to see if she can make you laugh, think, shift your expectations of a ‘victim’.

That’s interesting. I’ve actually come to Kandasamy backwards, I think. The first book of hers I read was her novella-memoir hybrid, Exquisite Cadavers . Which was written, I think, in response to how the earlier, highly garlanded novel was received. If When I Hit You does not appear overtly experimental on the page, Exquisite Cadavers certainly is—it’s split into two columns, one strand of which is fictional and the second a sort of metafictional commentary that reflects on her life and the writing process. One expects quite a lot of the reader, when writing in such a form. Or maybe you disagree?

I think we act like there’s more we need from the reader than we actually do. That’s the barrier for people getting into this kind of writing. I think often experimental fiction is used as a warning term rather than as a way of elaborating what the writing is.

Absolutely. The second book you’ve chosen is The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride.

I had to look at this again yesterday, because although I have such a vivid recollection of the feeling of reading it, I couldn’t remember anything about it on a line level! I opened it and thought, ‘wow, so this is what it looks like.’ I guess because it’s so voice-led, you completely enter that head. It’s true consciousness. McBride’s really good at, like, skipping to the image of the association—the kind of narrative preamble, or narrative signposting, that writers often give she will skip, not because she’s trying to be cryptic, but because in real consciousness none of those things exist. You’ve instantly leapt to the next thought or sensation.

It’s a love story between an 18-year-old girl who just moved from Ireland to London to attend drama school, and the older actor she meets in a pub. They slowly unveil their stories to each other, but both are hiding parts of themselves.

Partly it’s about the unknowability of the other, but also the ability to learn so much through love. The lyricism of it is just something else. There’s such a music, such a lilt to it. There’s rhythm and movement to how you read it, any reader would get that. And that’s something incredible to establish.

A lot of people have remarked upon the sexually explicit nature of this book. But one wonders if sex is not perhaps the perfect experience to be rendered as stream of consciousness . I guess I’m also thinking of certain scenes in Ulysses , which McBride herself has talked about as a prime literary influence. But does McBride bring a new approach to this form?

Experimental fiction both points forward and back. We often describe things as new, when they are speaking as part of a tradition. But there is a noticeable newness to this book, and it’s in the deftness of language and the immersion—you feel so entirely in this person’s head whilst also being so clearly told a story. The way she gets inside people’s bodies, and writes sex in such a brilliant, honest and felt way. I think that is genuinely new. And if sex is something that is more instinctive, relies more on sensation and the unifying of desire and the body, then yes, surely experimental fiction serves that best: like sex, it defies a linear, straightforward recounting.

It was a highly anticipated follow up to her very acclaimed debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing . How similar are they—as books, as reading experiences?

Next up on our experimental fiction reading list is a Virginia Woolf book I admit I wasn’t familiar with: Between the Acts , her final novel which was published posthumously.

Yes, there’s a split over whether it was finished or not. She never did her final revise of it, and often she did do quite a lot of work in that act of revision. But it doesn’t read like something unfinished. It’s very, very accomplished, and one of my favourite of Woolf’s books.

It takes place at a village pageant in the summer preceding World War Two. I read it as a teenager and was so obsessed with it. I remember getting into an argument with a literature professor at an interview for a university that I very much got rejected from. It was so weird. We both loved Virginia Woolf, but both had very different visions of what that book was. I was young, so sure! I was the naïve one, more likely to be wrong but, at the same time, I remember this man puffing out—because I disagreed with him.

What I was making the case for—and what I still agree with—is how obsessed that book is with the idea of individualism versus society, the exhausting nature of being one person whilst also being so recognisably within the midst of a group, connected to other people.

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I remember him being like, ‘it’s about the war!’ And I was like, I get that it’s about the war, but it’s also about these other things. We just couldn’t connect. I mean, it is about the war,  to be fair—so much of it is about the burden of retrospect. It’s just before the war arrives, but they know the war is coming. Another war’s happened already. And so everything’s laced with this very aggressive, violent imagery. There’s something simmering. It’s all about living in what seems a simple present tense that’s about to combust into historical significance.

Let’s talk about J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year next. This is another one that’s pretty interesting to look at on the page. It’s separated into parallel narratives; could you tell us a little about the plot or rather plots, plural?

It begins with the page split into two, horizontally. We have on the top an extract from a book by an old Australian writer, called Strong Opinions . It’s political essays, stuff like that. That’s the top narrative, and initially the bottom narrative is him, first-person, his life as he’s writing the manuscript. Quickly he meets a woman called Anya, in the laundry room of his apartment building. He’s very struck by her, she’s very attractive, she’s a lot younger… there’s something about her that intrigues him. So he asks her to start typing up his manuscript for the book, the first narrative.

Suddenly she appears as a third column, or rather a horizontal division. So now you have the book, his first-person, her first-person. And each informs the others. So you see two perspectives – how she sees him, and how he sees her. He embroils her in his life, but she also embroils herself, because she and her boyfriend start to plot how to insinuate themselves. He’s got a lot of money—maybe they could get some of his cash.

“It sounds very complicated, but it’s incredibly easy to read, and it’s very profound”

You have these interfering narratives, and you can read across the double spread of the page, or down each page. Depending on which way you do it, you learn different things about each of the segments. That sounds very complicated, but it’s incredibly easy to read, and it’s very profound. This guy’s dying, so it’s about being a writer, how to make meaning, and the difference between the creator and the product—seeing this fallible human being behind the authoritative essay.

It does also have a very propulsive story. A classic narrative, of someone thinking they are intentionally bringing someone into their life, and at the same time they are being undone. Who has the power?

Mmm, yes. And this three-stranded form really represents exactly what you were getting at in the start of our conversation: the clarity of prose, the mess of reality. But one thing I suppose I worry about—and maybe other readers worry about this too—when you mention there are multiple ways of reading this book, I guess that allows for the possibility of reading it ‘wrong.’

I think that is often the reader’s fear. I always want to say to people: ‘Hey, don’t worry. Just trust yourself.’ That’s what I say to myself, sometimes. Readers often fear they don’t have the authority to tackle a text. Or just see it as something they have to ‘tackle.’ But a writer doesn’t write something with an authoritative insistence of how it should be read. They lay out a path of how to read it, and you as a reader will follow that – or make your own. little scratch , particularly, exists to be read in different ways, and the reader is meant to make their own choices. Depending on what choice they make, they get different things. That’s the same for Diary of a Bad Year ; those decisions are important, but they’re meant to be fun. They’re not meant to be a stress. The reader should remember that once the book is in their hands, they’re the authority. It’s their reading experience, they’re in control.

Just before we move on, I wanted to read you a quote from the Guardian : “The ensuing comedy of conflicting perspectives, of high rhetoric and low aims, is an amazingly strange thing for Coetzee to have decided to write.” What do you think about that? Is invention itself the aim?

I don’t know. I didn’t think it was strange. I mean maybe, in as much that it’s kind of crazy that it came out of someone’s head. But who are we to say what a writer will write next? And why would we want that to be predictable? The novel is exciting in its formal invention, but as a story in its own right, it’s interesting. The form is a way of getting you closer to the story. It’s not an indulgent thing.

Right, this brings us to our final work of experimental fiction. This is Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation , one of my own top favourite books. I think I’ve read it, honestly, upwards of 100 times. I carry it around on my phone, on my Kindle app, and just reread it on the bus, or anywhere. Do you feel the same? What do you like about it?

It’s quite a hard book to summarise, because it’s so much about those myriad moments that make up a life, or relationship, or anything. Firstly, it’s really funny. People don’t talk directly enough about how funny Jenny Offill is.

It’s essentially about a test of marriage, a kind of imperfect love story. Right? It’s both very sad and very funny.

Right. And it’s told in fragments, each of which are a sentence, or a paragraph, long.

You have these moments between the fragments to take a break, just to laugh, or absorb it. She takes the ordinariness of life and she makes it mean something. I think she proves why every moment of life can have significance, and how the quiet moments of existence contribute to our sense of self.

Last year, when her new book Weather came out, there was a picture of the fragments of Weather , how she’d rearrange them. Seeing that patchwork was amazing, because you can forget when a product is complete that so much work goes into the order of these things. Even just choosing the right ones… there will be so many rejected fragments. It affirmed the level of precision with which she works in order to create these novels.

She’s said that the gaps are moments for the reader to have an imagination. She doesn’t want to fill in the gaps. Because in doing so you eliminate or pin the story down. By fragmenting you allow the reader to immerse themselves in, be part of the world in a more intense way. The absences give the created world a greater imaginative potential.

I really enjoy fragmented fiction, especially this book. But as a style it’s recently become common enough—perhaps riding the wave of Offill’s success—to have inspired a rather funny satire of the form in Lauren Oyler’s new novel Fake Accounts . And of course, you’ve found mainstream success with little scratch. Do you feel like experimental fiction is becoming more influential, more popular?

I don’t know. I think that the fact that little scratch was published and accepted and treated as a novel speaks to a healthy publishing culture. Certainly there’s more space for it and, I think, more commercial viability, which is the key sign that people are open to it.

There’s still a lot of pushback. There’s still a strange treatment of experimental writing. And, you know, when I see people talking about my book, it’s the first thing they do, right? They say, ‘okay, guys, this looks weird, but don’t worry, you’re going to be able to get into it.’ There’s an apology at the beginning. I find that strange. ‘Experimental’ has taken on this negative association. It’s something that we have to forgive, that you can get something from despite it.

I think that kind of negates the whole purpose of this type of writing, which is to help immerse the reader further in the story. It serves a purpose. It’s there to do something beyond looking funny. It’s meant to open up new possibilities. I find it sad that it is often seen as a boundary. We are still very obsessed with keeping that boundary, putting the signpost up. I think we need to work on that.

Do you feel that is anti-intellectual, somehow?

Maybe? I think some readers fear they are being pushed away, or that it’s coded for a certain level of education, rather than for a general reader—which I don’t think is true.

But I think what you were saying earlier about being scared of not approaching the text ‘right’—those kind of insecurities, it’s not that formal or informal education helps you read better, but that maybe it gives you a level of self-trust. Sometimes we need an ego to trust ourselves as a reader. But it’s too complicated to make generalisations. Some think ‘experimental’ fiction is elitist, like it’s trying to shut out a certain reader. But all I can say for myself is that I’m writing for all readers. And I hope little scratch will show some readers who might feel hesitant over formally inventive writing, that shaking up the page can sometimes be a more natural way to read. It might bring you closer, rather than push you away.

April 12, 2021

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Rebecca Watson

Rebecca Watson is the author of little scratch , which is published by Faber in the UK and Doubleday in the US. She was picked as one of The Observer 's ten best debut novelists of 2021. Her work has been published in The TLS, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. She works part-time as assistant arts editor at the Financial Times and lives in London.

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Experimental Fiction: Book Genre Explained – Ultimate Guide

Experimental fiction is a literary genre that plays with various conventions of traditional storytelling to create a novel reading experience. It is characterized by its focus on innovation, often breaking away from established norms and structures in literature to explore new narrative techniques, styles, and themes. This genre is often associated with postmodernism, but it is not limited to it, as it can be found in works from different periods and movements.

Experimental fiction is not defined by a specific set of characteristics, but rather by its willingness to challenge the status quo. It is a genre that is constantly evolving, pushing the boundaries of what is considered possible in literature. This makes it a fascinating area of study, as it offers a glimpse into the creative process of writers who are not afraid to take risks and explore uncharted territories.

Origins of Experimental Fiction

The origins of experimental fiction can be traced back to the early 20th century, a period marked by significant social, political, and cultural changes. The advent of modernism brought about a shift in literary conventions, as writers began to experiment with form and content in an attempt to capture the complexities of modern life.

One of the earliest examples of experimental fiction is James Joyce’s “ Ulysses ,” a novel that broke away from traditional narrative structures to explore the inner workings of the human mind. Other notable works from this period include Virginia Woolf’s “ To the Lighthouse ” and Gertrude Stein’s “ Tender Buttons ,” both of which challenged conventional notions of plot, character, and narrative.

Modernism and Experimental Fiction

Modernism played a crucial role in the development of experimental fiction. This movement, which emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was characterized by a rejection of traditional forms and a focus on new ways of seeing and understanding the world. This led to a surge in experimental literature, as writers sought to reflect the complexities of modern life through innovative narrative techniques.

Key figures in modernist literature, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot, pushed the boundaries of what was considered possible in literature, experimenting with stream of consciousness, non-linear narratives, and fragmented structures. Their works paved the way for future generations of experimental writers, setting a precedent for innovation and creativity in literature.

Postmodernism and Experimental Fiction

Postmodernism, a movement that emerged in the mid-20th century, also had a significant impact on experimental fiction. Postmodern writers, like Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme, continued the modernist tradition of challenging literary conventions, but they also introduced new elements, such as metafiction, intertextuality, and pastiche.

These writers questioned the very nature of reality and representation, exploring the relationship between language, meaning, and truth. Their works often blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality, challenging readers to question their own perceptions and assumptions.

Characteristics of Experimental Fiction

While experimental fiction is not defined by a specific set of characteristics, there are several elements that are commonly found in this genre. These include unconventional narrative structures, a focus on the process of writing, an emphasis on language and form over plot, and a willingness to challenge established norms and conventions.

Experimental fiction often breaks away from traditional narrative structures, opting instead for fragmented, non-linear, or disjointed narratives. This can take many forms, from stream of consciousness and multiple perspectives to metafiction and intertextuality. The goal is to create a novel reading experience, one that challenges readers to engage with the text in new and unexpected ways.

Unconventional Narrative Structures

One of the defining characteristics of experimental fiction is its use of unconventional narrative structures. This can take many forms, from fragmented or disjointed narratives to non-linear or cyclical structures. These unconventional structures challenge the reader’s expectations, forcing them to engage with the text in new and unexpected ways.

For example, in “ Finnegans Wake ,” James Joyce uses a cyclical structure, with the end of the book leading directly back to the beginning. This circular narrative reflects the cyclical nature of history, suggesting that events are doomed to repeat themselves. Similarly, in “ If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler ,” Italo Calvino uses a metafictional structure, with the reader becoming a character in the story.

Focus on the Process of Writing

Another common characteristic of experimental fiction is its focus on the process of writing. Many experimental writers use their work to explore the relationship between the writer, the text, and the reader, often blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

For example, in “ At Swim-Two-Birds ,” Flann O’Brien creates a story within a story, with characters that are aware of their fictional status. This metafictional approach challenges the reader’s assumptions about the nature of fiction, forcing them to question their role in the reading process.

Notable Works of Experimental Fiction

There are many notable works of experimental fiction that have pushed the boundaries of what is considered possible in literature. These include “ Ulysses ” by James Joyce, “ To the Lighthouse ” by Virginia Woolf, “ Gravity’s Rainbow ” by Thomas Pynchon, and “ House of Leaves ” by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Each of these works offers a unique reading experience, challenging readers to engage with the text in new and unexpected ways. They represent the breadth and diversity of experimental fiction, demonstrating the many ways in which writers can innovate and experiment with form and content.

“Ulysses” by James Joyce

“ Ulysses ” is often cited as one of the greatest works of experimental fiction. Published in 1922, this novel breaks away from traditional narrative structures to explore the inner workings of the human mind. Joyce uses a variety of narrative techniques, including stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and parallax, to create a complex and multi-layered narrative.

The novel follows the lives of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom over the course of a single day in Dublin. Despite its complex structure and dense prose, “Ulysses” is renowned for its depth and complexity, offering a rich and detailed portrait of life in early 20th century Dublin.

“Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon

“ Gravity’s Rainbow ” is another seminal work of experimental fiction. Published in 1973, this novel is known for its complex structure, dense prose, and wide range of references. Pynchon uses a variety of narrative techniques, including multiple perspectives, intertextuality, and metafiction, to create a sprawling and labyrinthine narrative.

The novel is set during World War II and follows the lives of several characters, including Tyrone Slothrop, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army who is investigating a mysterious V-2 rocket. “Gravity’s Rainbow” is renowned for its complexity and depth, offering a detailed and intricate portrait of the chaos and confusion of war.

Impact of Experimental Fiction

Experimental fiction has had a profound impact on the literary landscape, challenging established norms and conventions and pushing the boundaries of what is considered possible in literature. It has influenced a wide range of writers and movements, from postmodernism and metafiction to magical realism and speculative fiction.

By challenging the status quo, experimental fiction has opened up new possibilities for storytelling, allowing writers to explore new narrative techniques, styles, and themes. It has also encouraged readers to engage with texts in new and unexpected ways, challenging their assumptions and perceptions.

Influence on Other Genres

Experimental fiction has had a significant influence on other genres, from postmodernism and metafiction to magical realism and speculative fiction. By challenging established norms and conventions, it has opened up new possibilities for storytelling, allowing writers to explore new narrative techniques, styles, and themes.

For example, the use of non-linear narratives and multiple perspectives in experimental fiction has influenced the development of postmodern literature , while the focus on language and form has had a significant impact on poetry and drama. Similarly, the exploration of the boundaries between fiction and reality has influenced the development of magical realism and speculative fiction.

Impact on Readers

Experimental fiction has also had a significant impact on readers, challenging their assumptions and perceptions. By breaking away from traditional narrative structures, it forces readers to engage with the text in new and unexpected ways, encouraging them to question their own perceptions and assumptions.

For example, the use of metafiction in experimental fiction challenges the reader’s assumptions about the nature of fiction, forcing them to question their role in the reading process. Similarly, the use of unconventional narrative structures forces readers to engage with the text in new and unexpected ways, challenging their expectations and perceptions.

Experimental fiction is a fascinating and diverse genre that pushes the boundaries of what is considered possible in literature. From its origins in modernism to its influence on postmodernism and other movements, it has played a crucial role in shaping the literary landscape, challenging established norms and conventions and opening up new possibilities for storytelling.

While it may not be for everyone, experimental fiction offers a unique reading experience, one that challenges readers to engage with the text in new and unexpected ways. Whether you’re a seasoned reader or new to the genre, there’s no denying the impact and importance of experimental fiction in the world of literature.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Experimental Novels › Experimental Novels and Novelists

Experimental Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 6, 2019 • ( 2 )

Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its inception but inevitably becomes, over time, conventional. Regarding long fiction, however, the situation is a bit more complex.

It is apparent that, four centuries after Miguel de Cervantes wrote what is generally recognized the first important novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), readers have come to accept a certain type of long fiction as most conventional and to regard significant departures from this type as experimental. This most conventional variety is the novel of realism as practiced by nineteenth century giants such as Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot .

The first task in surveying contemporary experiments in long fiction, therefore, is to determine what “conventional” means in reference to the novel of realism. Most nineteenth century novelists considered fiction to be an imitative form; that is, it presents in words a representation of reality. The underlying assumption of these writers and their readers was that there is a shared single reality, perceived by all—unless they are mad, ill, or hallucinatory—in a similar way. This reality is largely external and objectively verifiable. Time is orderly and moves forward. The novel that reflects this view of reality is equally orderly and accountable. The point of view is frequently, though not always, omniscient (all-knowing): The narrators understand all and tell their readers all they need to know to understand a given situation. The virtues of this variety of fiction are clarity of description and comprehensiveness of analysis.

After reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886), one can be confident that he or she knows something about Emma Bovary’s home, village, and manner of dress; knows her history, her motivations, and the way she thought; and knows what others thought of her. Not knowing would be a gap in the record; not knowing would mean, according to standards against which readers have judged “conventional” novels, a failure of the author.

Modernism and its Followers

Early in the twentieth century, a disparate group of novelists now generally referred to as modernists— James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , William Faulkner , Franz Kafka , Marcel Proust , and others—experimented with or even abandoned many of the most hallowed conventions of the novel of realism. These experiments were motivated by an altered perception of reality. Whereas the nineteenth century assumption was that reality is external, objective, and measurable, the modernists believed reality to be also internal, subjective, and dependent upon context. Reflecting these changing assumptions about reality, point of view in the modernist novel becomes more often limited, shifting, and even unreliable rather than omniscient.

This subjectivity reached its apogee in one of the great innovations of modernism, the point-of-view technique dubbed “stream of consciousness,” which plunges the reader into a chaos of thoughts arrayed on the most tenuous of organizing principles—or so it must have seemed to the early twentieth century audience accustomed to the orderly fictional worlds presented by the nineteenth century masters.

Once reality is acknowledged to be inner and subjective, all rules about structure in the novel are abandoned. The most consistent structuring principle of premodernist novelists—the orderly progression of time—was rejected by many modernists. Modern novels do not “progress” through time in the conventional sense; instead, they follow the inner, subjective, shifting logic of a character’s thoughts. Indeed, the two great innovations of modernist fiction—stream of consciousness and nonchronological structure—are inseparable in the modern novel.

Among the most famous and earliest practitioners of these techniques were Joyce (especially Ulysses , 1922, and Finnegans Wake , 1939), Woolf (especially Jacob’s Room , 1922; Mrs. Dalloway , 1925; and To the Lighthouse , 1927), and Faulkner (especially The Sound and the Fury , 1929; As I Lay Dying , 1930). Many of the experimental works of post-World War II long fiction extended these techniques, offering intensely subjective narrative voices and often extreme forms of stream of consciousness, including disruptions of orderly time sequences.

In La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth , 1971), Manuel Puig employs (among other techniques) the words of several sets of characters in different rooms of a house without identifying the speakers or providing transitions to indicate a change in speaker. The effect may be experienced by the reader as a strange solipsistic cacophony, or something like a disjointed choral voice; in fact, the technique is a variation on stream of consciousness and not so very different from the tangle of interior monologues in Faulkner ’s novels.

Tim O’Brien’s novel of the Vietnam War, Going After Cacciato (1978, revised 1989), is another example of a work that makes fresh use of a modernist strategy. Here, reality at first seems more external and hence clearer than in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth . The bulk of the action concerns a rifle squad that follows a deserter, Cacciato, out of Vietnam and across Asia and Europe until he is finally surrounded in Paris, where he once again escapes. The chapters that make up this plot, however, are interspersed with generally shorter chapters recounting the experiences of the point-of-view character, Paul Berlin, at home and in Vietnam. In another set of short chapters, Berlin waits out a six-hour guard shift in an observation post by the sea. The most orderly part of the novel is the pursuit of Cacciato, which moves logically through time and place. The perceptive reader eventually realizes, however, that the pursuit of Cacciato is a fantasy conjured up by Berlin, whose “real” reality is the six hours in the observation post, where his thoughts skip randomly from the present to the past (in memories) to a fantasy world. As in the best modernist tradition, then, the structure of Going After Cacciato reflects an inner, subjective reality.

The post-World War II writer who most famously and provocatively continued the modernist agenda in long fiction was Samuel Beckett, especially in his trilogy: Molloy (1951; English translation, 1955), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies , 1956), and L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable , 1958). In each successive novel, external reality recedes as the narrative voice becomes more inward-looking. In Molloy , for example, the title character searches for his mother, but he is lost from the beginning. He can find neither her (if she truly exists) nor his way back home, wherever that is—nor can he be sure even of the objective reality of recent experience. In one passage Molloy notes that he stayed in several rooms with several windows, but then he immediately conjectures that perhaps the several windows were really only one, or perhaps they were all in his head. The novel is filled with “perhapses” and “I don’t knows,” undermining the reader’s confidence in Beckett’s words.

The subjectivity and uncertainty are intensified in Malone Dies . At least in Molloy, the protagonist was out in the world, lost in a countryside that appears to be realistic, even if it is more a mindscape than a convincing geographic location. In Malone Dies , the protagonist spends most of his days immobile in what he thinks is a hospital, but beyond this nothing—certainly not space or time—is clear. As uncertain of their surroundings as Molloy and Malone are, they are fairly certain of their own reality; the unnamed protagonist of the final volume of the trilogy, The Unnamable , does not know his reality. His entire labyrinthine interior monologue is an attempt to find an identity for himself and a definition of his world, the one depending upon the other. In those attempts, however, he fails, and at no time does the reader have a confident sense of time and place in reference to the protagonist and his world.

The New Novel

With The Unnamable , long fiction may seem to have come a great distance from the modernist novel, but in fact Beckett was continuing the modernist practice of locating reality inside a limited and increasingly unreliable consciousness. Eventually, voices cried out against the entire modernist enterprise. Among the earliest and most vocal of those calling for a new fiction—for le nouveau roman, or a new novel—was a group of French avantgarde writers who became known as the New Novelists. However, as startlingly innovative as their fiction may at first appear, they often were following in the footsteps of the very modernists they rejected.

Among the New Novelists (sometimes to their dismay) were Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Even though Simon won the Nobel Prize in Literature, probably the most famous (or infamous) of the New Novelists was Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet decried what he regarded as outmoded realism and set forth the program for a new fiction in his Pour un nouveau roman (1963; For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction , 1965). His own career might offer the best demonstration of the movement from old to new. His first published novel, Les Gommes (1953; The Erasers, 1964), while hardly Dickensian, was not radically innovative. With Le Voyeur (1955; The Voyeur , 1958), however, his work took a marked turn toward the experimental, and with La Jalousie (1957; Jealousy, 1959) and Dans le labyrinthe (1959; In the Labyrinth, 1960), the New Novel came to full flower.

The most famous technical innovation of the New Novelists was the protracted and obsessive descriptions of objects—a tomato slice or box on a table or a picture on a wall—often apparently unrelated to theme or plot. The use of this device led some critics to speak of the “objective” nature of the New Novel, as if the technique offered the reader a sort of photographic clarity. On the contrary, in the New Novel, little is clear in a conventional sense. Robbe-Grillet fills his descriptions with “perhapses” and “apparentlys” along with other qualifiers, and the objects become altered or metamorphosed over time. After Robbe-Grillet’s early novels, time is rarely of the conventional earlier-to-later variety but instead jumps and loops and returns.

One example of the transforming nature of objects occurs in The Voyeur , when a man on a boat peers obsessively at the figure-eight scar left by an iron ring flapping against a seawall. Over the course of the novel the figure-eight pattern becomes a cord in a salesman’s suitcase, two knotholes side by side on a door, a bicycle, a highway sign, two stacks of plates, and so on—in more than a dozen incarnations. Moreover, Robbe-Grillet’s objects are not always as “solid.” A painting on a wall (In the Labyrinth) or a photograph in a newspaper lying in the gutter ( La Maison de rendez-vous , 1965; English translation, 1966) may become “animated” as the narrative eye enters it, and the action will transpire in what was, a paragraph before, only ink on paper or paint on canvas.

Such techniques indeed seemed radically new, far afield of the novels of Joyce and Faulkner. However, it is generally the case with the New Novelists, especially with Robbe-Grillet, that this obsessive looking, these distortions and uncertainties and transformations imposed on what might otherwise be real surfaces, have their origins in a narrative consciousness that warps reality according to its idiosyncratic way of seeing. The point-of-view character of In the Labyrinth is a soldier who is likely feverish and dying; in The Voyeur , a psychotic murderer; in Jealousy, a jealous husband who quite possibly has committed an act of violence or contemplates doing so. In all cases the reader has even more trouble arriving at definitive conclusions than is the case with the presumably very difficult novels of Joyce and Faulkner.

Ultimately, the New Novelists’ program differs in degree more than in kind from the modernist assumption that reality is subjective and that fictional structures should reflect that subjectivity. As famous and frequently discussed as the New Novelists have been, their fiction has had relatively little influence beyond France, and when literary theorists define “postmodernism” (that is, the literary expression that has emerged after, and is truly different from, modernism), they rarely claim the New Novel as postmodern.

Metafiction

A far more significant departure from modernism occurred when writers began to reject the notion that had been dominant among novelists since Miguel de Cervantes: that it is the chief duty of the novelist to be realistic, and the more realistic the fiction the worthier it is. This breakthrough realization—that realism of whatever variety is no more than a preference for a certain set of conventions—manifests itself in different ways in fiction. In metafiction, also known as self-mimesis or selfreferential fiction, the author (or his or her persona), deliberately reminds the reader that the book is a written entity; in the traditional novel, however, the reader is asked to suspend his or her disbelief.

Often the metafictive impulse appears as little more than an intensification of the first-person-omniscient narrator, the “intrusive author” disparaged by Henry James but favored by many nineteenth century writers. Rather than employing an “I” without an identity, as in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (1847-1848), metafiction makes clear that the “I” is the novel’s author. Examples of this technique include the novels of José Donoso in Casa de campo (1978; A House in the Country, 1984) and of Luisa Valenzuela in Cola de lagartija (1983; The Lizard’s Tail, 1983).

In other novels, the metafictive impulse is more radical and transforming. When Donald Barthelme stops the action halfway through Snow White (1967), for example, and requires the reader to answer a fifteen-question quiz on the foregoing, the readers’ ability to “lose themselves” in the novel’s virtual world is hopelessly and hilariously destroyed. Another witty but vastly different metafictive novel is Italo Calvino ’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , 1981), in which the central character, Cavedagna, purchases a novel called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by an author named “Italo Calvino.” Cavedagna finds that his copy is defective: The first thirty-two pages are repeated again and again, and the text is not even that of Calvino; it is instead the opening of a Polish spy novel. The remainder of the book concerns Cavedagna’s attempts to find the rest of the spy novel, his blossoming romance with a woman on the same mission, and a rambling intrigue Calvino would surely love to parody had he not invented it. Furthermore, the novel is constructed around a number of openings of other novels that never, for a variety of reasons, progress past the first few pages.

Metafiction is used to represent the impossibility of understanding the global world, particularly the complexity of politics and economics. Critically acclaimed metafictive novels include Australian Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985), American Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Canadian Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), and South-African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (2005). Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). The novel is ostensibly a love story about a Dominican American man in New Jersey, but through a series of extended footnotes and asides the narrator relates and comments on the history of the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The novel has different narrators and settings, as well as occasional messages from the author, and is filled with wordplay and lively slang in English and Spanish.

Fiction as Artifice

One might well ask if metafiction is not too narrow an endeavor to define an age (for example, postmodernism). The answer would be yes, even If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , for example, might more properly be described as a novel whose subject is reading a novel rather than writing one. Metafiction is best considered one variation of a broader, more pervasive impulse in post-World War II long fiction: fiction-as-artifice. Rather than narrowly focusing on the process of writing fiction (metafiction), in fiction-as-artifice the author directly attacks the conventions of realism or acknowledges that all writing is a verbal construct bearing the most tenuous relationship to actuality.

One of the earliest examples of fiction-as-artifice in the post-World War II canon is Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947; Exercises in Style , 1958). The title states where Queneau’s interests lie: in technique and in the manipulation of language, rather than in creating an illusion of reality. The book comprises ninety-nine variations on a brief scene between two strangers on a Parisian bus. In each retelling of the incident, Queneau uses a different dialect or style (“Notation” and “Litotes”). The almost endless replication of the single scene forces the reader to see that scene as a verbal construct rather than an approximation of reality. Such “pure” manifestations of fiction-as-artifice as Exercises in Style are relatively rare. More often, fiction-as-artifice is a gesture employed intermittently, side by side with realist techniques. The interplay of the two opposing strategies create a delightful aesthetic friction.

One of the most famous and provocative examples of fiction-as-artifice is Vladimir Nabokov ’s Pale Fire (1962). The structure of the work belies all traditional conventions of the novel. Pale Fire opens with an “editor’s” introduction, followed by a long poem, hundreds of pages of annotations, and an index. The reader discovers, however, that this apparatus tells a hilarious and moving story of political intrigue, murder, and madness. Does Pale Fire , ultimately, underscore the artifices of fiction or, instead, demonstrate how resilient is the writer’s need to tell a story and the reader’s need to read one? Either way, Pale Fire is one of the most inventive and fascinating novels of any genre.

The same questions could be asked of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966), a long novel comprising scores of brief, numbered sections, which, the reader is advised in the introductory “Instructions,” can be read in a number of ways: in the order presented, in a different numbered sequence suggested by the author, or perhaps, if the reader prefers, by “hopscotching” through the novel.

A similar strategy is employed in Milorad Pavic’s Hazarski renik: Roman leksikon u 100,000 reci (1984; Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words , 1988). The work is constructed as a dictionary with many brief sections, alphabetized by heading and richly cross-referenced. The reader may read the work from beginning to end, alphabetically, or may follow the cross-references. An added inventive complication is the Dictionary of the Khazars’s two volumes, one “male” and the other “female.” The volumes are identical except for one brief passage, which likely alters the reader’s interpretation of the whole.

Although fiction-as-artifice is European in origin— indeed, it can be traced back to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767)—its most inventive and varied practitioner is the American writer John Barth . In work after work, Barth employs, parodies, and lays bare for the reader’s contemplation the artifices of fiction.

In his unified collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968), for example, Barth narrates the history—from conception through maturity and decline—of a man, of humankind, and of fiction itself. The story’s telling, however, highlights the artificiality of writing. The first selection (it cannot be called a “story”) of the novel, “Frame Tale,” is a single, incomplete sentence—“Once upon a time there was a story that began”—which is designed to be cut out and pasted together to form a Möbius strip. When assembled, the strip leads to the complete yet infinite and never-ending sentence “Once upon a time there was a story that began Once upon a time. . . .” The novel’s title story, “ Lost in the Funhouse, ” contains graphs illustrating the story’s structure. “Glossolalia” is formed from six brief sections all written in the rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer . In “ Menelaid ,” the dialogue is presented in a dizzying succession of quotation marks within quotation marks within quotation marks. Barth’s experiments in Lost in the Funhouse are continued and intensified in later novels, especially Chimera (1972) and Letters (1979).

In The Broom of the System (1987) by David Foster Wallace, the protagonist, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, feels sometimes that she is just a character in a novel. Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is a massive work about a future North America where people become so engrossed in watching a film called Infinite Jest that they lose all interest in other activities. Wallace’s fiction moves back and forth in time without warning and combines wordplay, long sentences, footnotes and endnotes, transcripts, and acronyms to create a disjointed postmodern language.

Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable ( 2001) is an epistolary novel about a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina, where the government forbids the use of one letter of the alphabet, at a given time; in effect, the government is parsing the alphabet. The novel is a collection of letters and notes from inhabitants, often less than a page in length, written with a diminishing set of alphabet letters.

Fiction or Nonfiction?

Even at his most experimental, however, Barth never abandons his delight in storytelling. Indeed, virtually all the long fiction addressed thus far show innovations in certain technical strategies but do not substantially challenge the reader’s concept of what is “fictional.” A number of other writers, however, while not always seeming so boldly experimental in technique, have blurred the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction and thus perhaps represent a more fundamental departure from the conventional novel.

The new journalists—such as Truman Capote ( In Cold Blood , 1966), Norman Mailer ( The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History , 1968), Tom Wolfe ( The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , 1968), and Hunter S. Thompson with his Fear and Loathing series (beginning in 1972)—blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction by using novelistic techniques to report facts. However, the subtitle of Mailer’s work notwithstanding, the reader rarely is uncertain what side of the fictionnonfiction line these authors occupy. The same cannot be said for Don DeLillo (Libra, 1988). For his interpretation of the Kennedy assassination, DeLillo spent countless hours researching the voluminous reports of the Warren Commission and other historical documents. With this factual material as the basis for the novel and with assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as the central character, the degree to which Libra can be considered fictional as opposed to nonfictional remains a challenging question.

The question is even more problematic in reference to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976). Kingston conducted her research for her memoir not in library stacks but by plumbing her own memory, especially of stories told her by her mother. At times, Kingston not only is imaginatively enhancing reconstructed scenes but also is inventing details. Is this a work of autobiography or a kind of fiction?

Publishers had trouble classifying Nicholson Baker ’s The Mezzanine (1988) and W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants , 1996). The reader is fairly certain that the point-of-view character in The Mezzanine is fictional, but in what sense is his experience fictional? The work, made up of essaylike contemplations of whatever the persona’s eye falls on as he goes about his business on a mezzanine, recalls in some ways the intensely detailed descriptions of the New Novelists but with even less of an apparent conflict or movement toward climax one expects in fiction.

Sebald’s work is in some ways even odder. His short biographies of a selection of dislocated Europeans have a documentary feel—complete with photographs. The photographs, however, have a vagueness about them that makes them seem almost irrelevant to their subjects, and the reader has the uneasy impression that the book may well be a fabrication.

The distinction between fiction and nonfiction was brought into new relief in 2003, when James Frey published A Million Little Pieces , his memoir of escaping drug addiction. The memoir was aggressively gritty in its detail of the author’s struggles, and Frey was widely praised for his courage and honesty in revealing his own mistakes and weaknesses. In 2005 the book was named to Oprah’s Book Club , and soon after topped nonfiction best-seller lists. In 2006, however, much of the material in the “memoir” was found to have been fabricated. The resulting clamor from talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, Frey’s publishers, and readers led to a lively and interesting public debate over art and truth. Frey claimed that the work presented the “essential truth” of his life. Many readers continued to value the book as an honest accounting of what life is like for some addicts, but readers who felt that they had been defrauded were offered a refund. The Brooklyn Public Library, for example, moved the book to its fiction section.

Just as Baker and Sebald call into question what earlier generations would have thought too obvious to debate—the difference between fiction and nonfiction— one consistent impulse among experimenters in long fiction has been the question, What is necessary in fiction and what is merely conventional? Their efforts to test this question have brought readers some of the most provocative and entertaining works of fiction in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

BS Johnson with pages from his 1968 novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates , which could be shuffled and read in any order.

Bibliography Currie, Mark, ed. Metafiction. London: Longman, 1995. Collection of articles on experimental themes and techniques. Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Levitt, Morton. The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction from a New Point of View. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2006. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. 1965. New ed. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Seltzer, Alvin J. Chaos in the Novel: The Novel in Chaos. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Shiach, Morag, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction. 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010.

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Categories: Experimental Novels , Literature , Novel Analysis

Tags: 000 Words , A House in the Country , A Million Little Pieces , Alain Robbe-Grillet , American Literature , Analysis of Robbe-Grillet's Novels , Analysis of Truman Capote’s Novels , As I Lay Dying , aymond Queneau , Betrayed by Rita Hayworth , BS Johnson , Claude Simon , David Foster Wallace , Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100 , Die Ausgewanderten , Don DeLillo , Donald Barthelme , Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable ( , Exercises in Style , Experimental Long Fiction , Experimental Novels and Novelists , Fear and Loathing series , Fiction as Artifice , Finnegans Wake , For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction , Fragmentation in Novels , Franz Kafka , French avantgarde writers , French New Novelists , Going After Cacciato , Hunter S. Thompson , If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , Illywhacker , In Cold Blood , In the Labyrinth , Infinite Jest , Italo Calvino , J. M. Coetzee , Jacob’s Room , James Frey , James Joyce , John Barth , Julio Cortázar , Junot Díaz , Laurence Sterne , Lee Harvey Oswald , Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Lost in the Funhouse , Malone Dies , Manuel Puig , Marcel Proust , Mark Dunn , Mark Z. Danielewski , Maxine Hong Kingston , Metafiction , metafictive novels , Michel Butor , Milorad Pavic , Mrs. Dalloway , Nathalie Sarraute , new journalists novels , New Novelists , Nicholson Baker , nonchronological structure of novels , Norman Mailer , Novel Analysis , Oprah’s Book Club , Pale Fire , pastiche , Pastiche in Novels , Peter Carey , post-World War II fiction , Rayuela , Samuel Beckett , stream of consciousness , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , The Broom of the System , The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , The Emigrants , The Erasers , The Lizard’s Tail , The Mezzanine , The Novels of Robbe-Grillet , The Sound and the Fury , The Unfortunates , The Unnamable , The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts , Tim O’Brien , To the Lighthouse , Tom Wolfe , Tristram Shandy , Truman Capote , Ulysses , Virginia Woolf , Vladimir Nabokov , W. G. Sebald , William Faulkner , Yann Martel

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10 Experimental Novels That Are Worth the Effort

Today marks the US publication of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing , a highly experimental, Joycean novel that, despite the fact that modern readers often eschew difficulty, has been heaped with awards. It is, in fact, a difficult book — but it’s totally worth it. And it’s not the only one. After the jump, ten experimental novels that are worth the effort it takes to parse them. Take a look, and since this is only a list of one reader’s favorites, add your own to the bizarre pile in the comments.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing , Eimear McBride

McBride’s widely lauded novel is full of fragmented, floating sentences that sometimes feel like only gestures at sentences, like gestures at the things under thoughts, that real, pre-language stuff. It’s hard going at first, but once you let the language wash over you and form a rhythm, the book blossoms into a gorgeous, brutal stream of word and thought.

C , Tom McCarthy

McCarthy’s second novel is gorgeous and devastating, a search for patterns in the phenomenal world and a warning against the same; a book of just-missed connections, wireless communication and full-on joy. As Jennifer Egan wrote , “ C is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in Remainder ; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream.”

Hopscotch , Julio Cortázar

This is book that can be read in any order, with chapters that can be left out or left in, depending on the mood of the reader. It sounds easy to screw up this literary labyrinth, but you really can’t: every page hums with life and language, and however you make your way through, you’ll be glad you did. As Pablo Neruda famously wrote, “People who do not read Cortazar are doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease.”

Notable American Women , Ben Marcus

Marcus’ sophomore novel is totally weird, but also pretty gorgeous. Like another, later novel of Marcus’, language is weaponry here, and the protagonist of this book (“Ben Marcus”) is a child whose mother belongs to a cult of Silentists, obsessive verging on abusive. This novel constantly asks its reader to re-evaluate the real, both the absolute real and the relative real, and the difference between the two. For instance, the two blurbs on the back of this book are these: “Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world.” — George Saunders; “How can one word from Ben Marcus’s rotten, filthy heart be trusted?” — Michael Marcus, Ben’s father. Point and case.

The Mezzanine , Nicholson Baker

This entire novel takes place over the length of an escalator ride. No, no, it’s about 140 pages of minute details, imaginings, footnotes, and lists with columns like “Subject of Thought” and “Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in Descending Order).” There are times when the amount that Baker can focus on one tiny thing threatens to drive one mad, but in the end, the novel is a deeply moving meditation on change and life and, of course, language.

Speedboat , Renata Adler

Adler’s mostly plotless first novel is stunning, hilarious, vivid, vital. Let go of what you think a novel should be, and let this novel be what it is, and you’ll be rewarded by waves of pleasure on every page, both emotional and intellectual.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress , David Markson

This novel is organized as a long series of notes written continuously on a typewriter by the last woman on earth — a woman who is obsessed with art and philosophy and literature, but keeps forgetting, or confusing, or willfully misrepresenting things. Again, the book is sort of plotless and (especially for sticklers for facts) frustrating, but it’s also a beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking ode to loneliness and the world of the mind.

How to Be Both , Ali Smith

Smith’s newest novel, just recently shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, can be read two ways — depending on which version of it you happen to pick up. Some copies of the book begin with one of its interconnected stories, some with the other. In both structure and subject, Smith is investigating duality and the relationship of surface to substance. “It’s about fresco form,” Smith told The Guardian . “You have the very first version of the fresco underneath the skin, as it were, of the real fresco. There’s a fresco on the wall: there it is, you and I look at it, we see it right in front of us; underneath that there’s another version of the story and it may or may not be connected to the surface. And they’re both in front of our eyes, but you can only see one, or you see one first. So it’s about the understory. I have the feeling that all stories travel with an understory.”

JR , William Gaddis

This novel is long. This novel is almost entirely made up of untagged dialogue. This novel is brilliant and will suck you in and keep you forever.

The Emigrants , W.G. Sebald

Sebald’s writing is at the easy end of experimentalism — that is, there are no bizarre sentence structures, no choose-your-own-adventure-style tricks, no tomfoolery. But at its heart, his work is deeply experimental — after all, what is it? Novel, travelogue, essay? Some combination of these, complete with badly reproduced and sometimes doctored black and white photographs and the specter of Nabokov following us through all the complicated pages? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

8 Groundbreaking Experimental Novels That Are More than 100 Years Old

Reading Lists

Writers have been bending rules and genres for longer than you might think.

When I describe my novella Northwood to others, I always call it experimental —  mostly in order to manage their expectations. I initially conceived of Northwood as a book of poems, and though it settled into being a short novel, it still contains elements of poetry and linked microfiction. I tell people it’s “experimental” so they won’t be confused when it’s not what they expect. But what does “experimental” literature really mean? Experimental in relation to what? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say, not that Northwood is a brand-new experiment, but that it’s part of a long-standing, well-established tradition of literature that pushes boundaries of genre and form.

We tend to forget that there has always been work that plays with form, style, content; work that is modernist before the modern era, or postmodernist before the postmodern age, or avant-garde ahead of its time. Work that anticipates modes and subjects and ideas and structures that would be put to use ubiquitously decades later. But if all of the things so-called experimental writers do now have been done — many times — before, sometimes centuries ago, then what is really experimental or unusual or deviant about these works? What are our our literary norms, and who decides, and defines, that which is perceived to stray from them? What prompts a writer to stray from the path set by an external notion of the mainstream, or one’s own self-imposed categories, habits, genres? And do truly experimental works always feel new?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but in my own struggle to figure out what the heck I was doing with Northwood, I looked to some books that are 100 or more years old but which still feel strange today, books by writers who informed my own experiments with form and voice and style.

Jakob von Gunten , Robert Walser, 1909

This novel, about a young man who attends a school for servants headed by a mysterious, possibly incestuous, pair of siblings, completely disregards any traditional notion of plot or narrative arc. Full of fanciful, obsessive digressions on the nature of objects, light, and smiles, Walser (whom Kafka cited as an early influence) proved that a satisfying narrative could be almost wholly internal, moving in meandering circles or not at all, much like Louise-Bennant’s recent (and brilliant) Pond.

The Lulu Plays , Frank Wedekind, 1894

Written in two parts, spanning five acts, Wedekind’s mammoth Lulu is a twisted, hyper-sexualized, astoundingly feminist exploration of a young, murderous prostitute longing for freedom. I can’t say enough about the final act, which features one of the most intensely bathetic, horrific, and moving murder scenes I have ever read. It is at once ridiculous and emotional, sympathetic and sneering; it’s a masterpiece of tone ahead of its time, or any time.

Telegrams of the Soul , Peter Altenberg, circa 1890

This collection of Altenberg’s mini-“essays” are, like Walser’s short pieces, largely plotless and charmingly surreal (and, in their darker moods, a lot like Lydia Davis’ fictions — flash before flash was a genre). Take this line from his piece “On Smells”: “even good books never stink, they are the distillation of all the malodorous sins one has committed of which one has finally managed to extract a drop of fragrant humanity!”

The Thief of Talant , Pierre Reverdy, 1917

A novel that looks like poetry, or a book of poetry that looks like a novel — whatever it is, The Thief of Talant is formally fascinating and emotionally engaging. Unlike some of the other works listed here, the idiosyncrasies of which are surprising but sometimes dated in tone, Reverdy’s work feels completely out of time; it could have been written yesterday, and yet it is more than 100 years old.

The Other House , Henry James, 1896

This novel, told almost entirely in dialogue and plotted at a furious pace, reads more like a film script than a novel; there are no interminable sentences or endless blocks of text as per the late Jamesian mode here. A masterclass in economy, it’s a surprisingly cinematic novel written long before the film scripts it so uncannily resembles.

How Queer Writers Are Creating Queer Genres

Death , Anna Croissant-Rust, 1893

The short works of Croissant-Rust (yes, that was her real name) are a mix of wild emotion and detachment, full of exclamation points and exhortations while retaining an eerie sense of distance. Morbid, sentimental, surreal, Rust breaks down narrative into patterns of feeling, abandoning any formal devices or logic. When someone describes a modern work as “dreamlike,” I think of Rust, who is, for me, the original dreamer; these are pieces written by ghosts, desperate to send a message to the living while at the same time utterly resigned to failure.

Mysteries , Knut Hamsun, 1892

Like much of Hamsun’s pre-Nobel work, Mysteries is remarkable in its defiance of plot and traditional character development; not much happens (and, as the title suggests, what does happen isn’t explained), and characters’ motives are entirely obscure, yet Hamsun manages to create an atmosphere as gripping as any pot-boiler. I return to this book every year, trying to figure out how Hamsun manages to make so much out of so little; but it is so subtle, its magic so recessive, I doubt I’ll ever figure it out.

La Bas , Joris-Karl Huysmans, 1891

This book just flat out messes with my head. Its style mimics the decadence of the social world it depicts; dense, wild, intoxicating, repugnant, surreal, more Lynchian than Chekovian, anticipating the excesses of writers like Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker. For me, it’s fascinating more for its subject matter than its readability as a novel — the depiction of a psychotic Satanic mass alone is worth the price of admission, proving that there has always been an appetite for “edgy” work.

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Experimental Novels from the 21st Century

It’s a simple but profound truth: the novel is capable of anything.  There are some writers who give us straightforward narratives in which we can envelop ourselves and feel comforted.  But there are other writers who attempt to push against the barriers of fiction in order to create works that defy classification.  Experimental novels can be pretty hit or miss. But there are some experimental novels that reward you generously for doing the work of reading them.  We decided to compile a list of our ten favorite experimental novels of the 21st century so far.  Let us know what you …

It’s a simple but profound truth: the novel is capable of anything.  There are some writers who give us straightforward narratives in which we can envelop ourselves and feel comforted.  But there are other writers who attempt to push against the barriers of fiction in order to create works that defy classification.  Experimental novels can be pretty hit or miss. But there are some experimental novels that reward you generously for doing the work of reading them.  We decided to compile a list of our ten favorite experimental novels of the 21st century so far.  Let us know what you think, and which of your favorite experimentalists we should have included, in the comments section.

Only Revolutions: A Novel  by Mark Z Danielewski

Danielewski’s follow up to the terrifying bestseller, House of Leaves, is about a couple of eternal teenage lovers attempting to outrace time and history.  But what truly makes this a novelistic experiment is its poetic, stream-of-consciousness style, as well as the way the narratives of the young lovers are arranged.  You can read the book from Hailey’s point of view, then flip the book around and read it from Sam’s point of view.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress  by David Markson

Markson’s story begins with an intriguing premise: the protagonist is the last person left on earth.  She sits alone at her typewriter, documenting her thoughts, opinion, and searches for other life.  Like Danielewski’s book, this one isn’t experimental merely for its unconventional narrative and stream of consciousness style. What truly sets it apart is the way inconsistencies become layered in the protagonist’s narrative, casting doubt on whether she really is the last person on earth, or has actually gone mad.

NW  by  Zadie Smith

Smith’s fourth novel experiments with form, style, and voice.  It follows four primary characters, but the real focus of the novel is its NW London setting.  The formal pastiche that Smith paints—switching from first to third point of view, from long narratives to short stories, from stream-of-consciousness to formally rigid screenplay dialogue—is meant to mirror the polyphonics of modern day urban life.

Notable American Women  by Ben Marcus

This novel confuses genres and therefore confuses reality.  The protagonist is a young Ben Marcus, and is told from the point of view of Ben and each of his parents.  The language of the novel is highly inventive, creating a world so detailed and unique it seems like a reality unto itself.  Aside from genres and realities, the novel also confuses time.  And if that isn’t mind-bending enough for you, some of the blurbs on the book jacket feel real and normal, while some seem like inventions: “How can one word from Ben Marcus’s rotten filthy heart be trusted?” –Michael Marcus, Ben’s father.

The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?  By Padgett Powell

When it comes to experimental fiction, Padgett Powell is one of the definitive contributors to the canon.  Perhaps his most experimental novel, The Interrogative Mood is comprised exclusively of questions.  In spite of this, the novel is still a well contained and grounded, if unconventional, story.  How he pulls it off is something you’ll have to read to find out.

Remainder  by Tom McCarthy

Remainder made Tom McCarthy a notable modern experimental practitioner.  The novel follows a man who is injured in a freak accident and who receives an immodest sum of money as compensation.  His memory is damaged, and as images and moment begin to come back to him, he uses his money to stage these memories so that he can actually experience them again.  These events become more and more violent as the novel moves forward, begging questions of what sort of worlds exist with each of us, and what would happen if we brought those worlds to life?

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing  by Eimear McBride

McBride’s debut novel took nine years to secure a publisher, finally being released in 2013.  This speaks to its uniqueness, inventiveness, and difficulty.  Since being released it has achieved much acclaim and won many awards.  It tells the story of a girl and her brother who struggle against the tragic chaos of their lives.  It’s told from the girl’s point of view, which is scathing and angry and often difficult, though always rewarding, to parse.  Aside from awards, McBride’s novel has garnered comparisons to James Joyce, Virginia Woolfe, and Flann O’Brien, all three of whom could easily be on an Experimental Literature Mount Rushmore.

Cloud Atlas  by  David Mitchell

Mitchell’s third novel is distinguished by its nesting-doll structure—story within story within story, etc.  The narrative begins in the nineteenth century and moves all the way through time into a post-apocalyptic future, and then, of course, moves back through time into the nineteenth century. Here the first half of the first story, hundreds of pages later, concludes.  It’s another one of those novels, like many on this list, that seems near impossible to pull off, but somehow Mitchell does.

A Visit from the Goon Squad  by Jennifer Egan

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel defies labels.  Is it an interconnected short story collection, or is it a somewhat fragmented experimental novel?  Read it and decide for yourself.  However you see it, this book manages to pull off a number of complete narratives in a relatively short amount of space.  If that isn’t experimental enough, the book also features a chapter (or story) written entirely as a PowerPoint presentation.

The Pale King  by  David Foster Wallace

This list wouldn’t be complete without David Foster Wallace, whose second novel, Infinite Jest, was as unique and inventive a book as has ever been written.  His final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, is perhaps equally as inventive.  The novel changes forms on a dime—from descriptive scenery, to dialogues, to excerpts from the Illinois Tax Code, to character sketches—and also features sections narrated by a fictional “David Wallace.”  The story, for the most part, focuses on characters who work for the IRS.  It’s not possible to say what Wallace would have changed, added, or taken out had he lived to publish it.  However, as it stands, The Pale King is an ambitious novel from one of our most ambitious writers.

Featured image courtesy of https://bit.ly/1LC4qEK

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Experimental Literature In The 21st Century

Nirbhay Kanoria

April 20, 2018

David Mitchell – The Right Sort

“Valium brightens colours a bit. Reds are bloodier, blues go glassy, yellows sort of sing and greens pull you under like quicksand.” -David Mitchell

David Mitchell, the award-winning writer of Cloud Atla s decided to embrace new technology and released an entire short story on Twitter. Surprisingly, Mitchell doesn’t use Twitter often as he values his privacy. So what motivated him to release not just a few lines but an entire short story on the micro-blogging platform? The answer is simple, the medium supported the way he wanted to tell his story.

you may be interested in the following book of experimental literature that is composed entirely of sentences from the internet:

A Gun Is Not Polite, Jonathan Ruffian, ISBN 978-1090287281.

Best Regards, Dieter Kiepenkracher

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Book Reviews

Experimental fiction at its finest — and funniest.

Alan Cheuse

Sorry Please Thank You

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Experimental fiction in North America began with a genius of a doyen in Paris: Gertrude Stein, whose aesthetic assertion that writers shape and form and reform the medium of language the way sculptors work with stone, painters work with light and shape and composers work with sound, changed Hemingway forever and, thus, changed the nature of the American short story — or the American art story, at least.

So much for the Irish storywriter Frank O'Connor's waggish remark — leading from the strength of his strong realist tendencies — that experimental writing is "what looks funny on the page." O'Connor meant us to think of "funny" as odd, curious and not very rewarding. But if you think of the founding father of the experimental novel, patriarch Jimmy Joyce, funny on the page in Ulysses often meant funny ha-ha, as well as dramatically comical, mood-transforming and thought-provoking.

By both standards, one dismissive and the other adulatory, Sorry Please Thank You , Charles Yu's latest collection of short fiction, seems experimental and, at the same time — not always true of the experimental fiction in our time — wonderfully and often comically pleasing, even as it provokes and transforms. I don't know that there's a better story-bending talent at work than Yu since the rise of George Saunders.

"I am you. And you are me. Are we the same person? Depends on what you mean by person ..." We find this in the middle of a long riff titled "Note to Self," in which Yu corresponds with his alternate self. The story builds out rather delightfully from the notion of multiple persona- alities produced by fiction employing the writer as a character. We flow along in these pages with Yu's interrogatory seriousness as play. But there's as much play turning seriousness when you think about the echoes in the story of "I Am the Walrus," and the spliff-induced self-investigation that permeated the Sixties. "I am you, and you are me, and we are altogether ..."

Yu inhabits the house of mirrors originally built by Jorge Luis Borges in his story "Borges and I."

Borges and the Beatles! That's the world of Yu, in which he makes much of the richness of modernism — employing any technique, various stylistic turns, and any bit of information and news from ordinary life in order to make extraordinary art — with the intent to move beyond entertainment to something that borders on instruction or enlightenment. Those who think the world got created yesterday might think of this as "conceptual" story writing — or, to use Borges' oft-employed term, making "fictions." If you take a longer view you can see that Yu's success has many parents, from the oft-quoted Stein, the tone of Hemingway and Beckett, Virginia Woolf's fanciful short creations (as in, say, the story "Kew Gardens"), Calvino's game-faced fantasies and the low-key but powerful satire of Kurt Vonnegut.

What, you may say, is going on in Sorry Please Thank You that leads to all this name-dropping?

Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Third Class Superhero . Larry D. Moore/Random House hide caption

Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Third Class Superhero .

"Standard Loneliness Package" announces that a sly, nimble fantasist with a speculative edge is at work here. As the narrator immediately makes known, he is employed by a company that outsources human emotion. From the pain of root canals to the depths of grief, every variety of suffering has a price, and our man has done it. But by the end of this nimble and adroit piece of work, the narrator appears to be suffering from an emotional condition from which he does not care to be free.

Yu manages this deft balance of experimentation and emotion even with such banal material as a video game, in a story called "Hero Absorbs Major Damage," a parody of a manual for human behavior ("Human for Beginners") in which we first meet a character who calls himself "Charles Yu"; in "Open", a para-Borgesian tale in which a door hovers in the middle of a room, inviting the characters to enter; and in the title story, a plaintive suicide note that ends things for the writer of the note and for the collection itself.

"What shapes can the world take?" Yu asks in the middle of a lot of white space halfway through that manual on how to live. "A torus," he says, "a saddle, a Euclidean plane, on a brane, on a string, in a hologram, on a speeding train, in an infinite loop, a thirty-second universe, a maximal entropy universe, a backward-arrow-of-time universe. A no-causality universe."

Or a tour-de-force experiment in short fiction?

Experimental Writing By Contemporary Women Authors

Elliot Riley

Emily Butler is a librarian and writer. You can discover more of their literary opinions on their YouTube channel, youtube.com/emilybutler, and follow them on Twitter @EmilyFButler1.

View All posts by Elliot Riley

The world of experimental writing tends to be very homogenous. The publishing industry gives men, especially white cis straight men, more room to blend genres, push boundaries, and simply be weird in their writing. People in positions of power are more often given the chance to break convention through experimental writing.

The following is a short list of works by contemporary women writers, primarily women of color, pushing the boundaries of genre through experimental writing.

Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler

Fowler’s debut novel is the story of a young Brazilian woman growing up in London and navigating two distinct cultures. As a “stubborn archivist,” the main character chronicles her experiences, even seemingly small details of her existence. Fowler’s unusual coming-of-age narrative breaks formal conventions as several sections are written in free verse. The non-chronological narrative unfolds in a series of beautifully written vignettes.

The White Book by Han Kang

Han Kang is perhaps best known for her 2016 novel The Vegetarian . The White Book , however, was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, and is arguably Kang’s most experimental work. In this partially autobiographical book, she weaves together the story of her own life with the imagined story of her baby sister who only lived for a few hours after she was born. Kang combines truth with fiction and poetry with prose, all while meditating on the motif of the color white.

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

To say too much about the experimental nature of Choi’s award winning 2019 novel, Trust Exercise , would inevitably spoil the plot. Suffice it to say that this is not your typical narrative—not in form, point of view, or tone. It is, however, a wildly entertaining adult novel about a group of high school students in an elite theatre program in the 1980s. For readers with any experience in the arts, this novel is relatable, while at the same time, Choi’s writing is compellingly strange.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelsen

The Argonauts is a memoir centered around Nelson’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. It is the story of a couple building their family while undergoing transformations of the body. Nelson transforms through her pregnancy, Dodge through hormone replacement therapy. Nelson’s experimental writing provides a raw, refreshingly honest depiction of sexuality, motherhood, and the often surprising intersection of the two. The Argonauts certainly falls within the category of memoir, but it does not do so neatly. At times, Nelson’s writing veers into essay territory. Other times, the fragmented nature of her prose reads like poetry.

Self Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye, Translated by Jordan Stump

NDiaye incorporates elements of magical realism into this “memoir.” Ghosts and monsters make appearances, and individuals rise from the dead. Powerful, mysterious women in green appear throughout the narrative. Perhaps, then, “self portrait” truly is a more accurate genre description for the work than the term “memoir.” NDiaye’s experimental writing forces readers to think critically about the defining features of a genre, stretching literary imaginations into new realms.

The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

Gloria Naylor’s impeccable National Book Award–winning debut novel follows seven women living in the same rundown apartment building in an unnamed city. Naylor’s devastating narrative is an exploration of Black womanhood from several angles. She weaves together stories which are fully realized and believable, featuring characters who will stay with you long after you put the book down. The Women of Brewster Place is experimental in that many of the book’s sections stand alone as complete short stories, embedded within an overarching story which is undoubtedly a novel. It is a unique and devastating narrative.

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Artfulness: Intertextuality, Wordplay, and Precariousness in Contemporary Experimental Fiction

• January 2021
• Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63(134):1-24
• 63(134):1-24
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Contemporary Experimental Fiction and Visual Culture

Princeton university.

Experiment 6

http://www.scrollkit.com/s/4oN7c2h

This is like a weird hybrid decomposition of my experiment 5 (visual proposal). It is Humument-esque, an attempt to visualize lyrics of Blakroc and get closer to the creative aspect of my final project. Using word clouds of all the lyrics in the entire album, applying Phillips-type of washing out certain text, hoping to create a Shapton-influenced objectification of lyrics on paper.

Experiment 6: My Struggle Through Snapchat

Experiment 6**

Please click on the link above to see my reimagined version of Experiment 4: Self Representation.

I am telling a story of my day, where I go through regular Princeton struggles, and then find comfort in something I love. I decided to use the form of snapchat (which is a telephone app where one takes pictures, adds comments, draws pictures, and sends it to friends. The picture disappears after up to 10 seconds both from the friend’s telephone and the sender’s telephone). I picked this medium, since people my age often use this method of communication, and add a visual image of themselves to their messages to each other.

I think snapchatting is both a more intimate mode of communication, due to the inclusion of one’s own image, and a more distrustful method of communication, since the receiver does not get to keep the message. I could not capture that effect in this project unfortunately, since the images need to stay on the paper for grading. However, in an ideal context, I would like to create a comic strip that only exists for up to 10-ish seconds.

I put in explanatory, and emotional emoticon-type things in my first draft of Experiment 6, and then edited them all out. I think I finally learned to edit down, and to have faith in the images to carry the intended meaning on their own. I hope this reflects my growth through the experiments in this class.

I had a great time creating this [and so did my snapchat friends]. I hope you will too..

Experiment 6: Recomposed

My decomposition looks almost nothing like my original (experiment 1). The very top of the page is the only part directly copied and altered from the original. There were two aims for this piece:

1) to take some of the key images of my original work and make them more abstract.  I wanted to remove the quote from the immediate context of the book.

2) to experiment with my scanner. I don’t have the best scanner in the world but I wanted to see what details the scanner would pick up and leave out, what shadows it would create, if I manipulated the paper by crumbling it, bending, layering, etc.–to varying degrees of “success.” The piece is one sheet of paper about the size of the original, plus the text which I layered under (and therefore over) it.

Visual Proposal revision

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5Ldd2WTC5q8LU9lUWRtR0dEWW8&usp=sharing

in order to view: download folder and open index.html AK Williams

Visual Proposal…Revisualized.

In my visual proposal, I attempted to depict hyper attention with a simple two dimensional drawing.  Specifically, I hoped that I could introduce (using symbols) new media into Chris Ware’s  Building Stories (specifically the storyline of Phil) in order to force readers to engage in a hyper attention form of thinking.  However, I believe that experiment to have failed because it only symbolically and very tangentially applied the idea of hyper attention.  Furthermore, I came to an understanding that in many ways Ware’s texts are already a sort of hyper attentive model — many different types of books that you can pick up and put down, and so forth.  However, they still retain some notion of deep attention in that you can focus on only one book at at time.  Despite this, Chris Ware’s overlapping narratives scattered among different books in  Building Stories  provide a perfect opportunity to capitalize on the needs of hyper attention.  Now, I revise both the subject and the medium through which I do this, in hopes of transforming it into a true model of hyper attention.

Hyper attention, according to N. Katherine Hayles, a professor at UCLA, is characterized by the following:

— Rapidly switching among different tasks, and excellent ability to handle this change in environment.

— A preference for multiple streams of information

— Involves a high level of stimulation

— Ability to handle environments where multiple things compete for attention.

— Impatience with non interactive objects

Source:  Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes  by N. Katherine Hayles.

Here, a single narrative (which is recognizable as the demise of Branford Bee) is envisioned as an iPad app which caters to the hyper attentive model of thinking.  The narrative is actually told from three different perspectives in two different books.

The iPad app allows the user to toggle between perspectives of different characters (see the three icons on the right of each iPad ‘screen’) without differentiating between the different books.  Instead, it organizes the narrative by time and collapses all parts of the same story contained within various books into a single sequence.  Interdependent parts of the narrative (i.e. that the girl must open the window before Branford can escape) must be played out by the reader/user before the narrative continues along.  The reader/user moves the characters along the page until they reach their final destination as indicated in Ware’s original text/drawing.  i.e. in panel 1, the actual image is of the girl pouring detergent in to the washing machine.  As the finger swipes her along this path, she will move towards the laundry machine and pick up the detergent.

By rendering Building Stories in this fashion on the iPad, I capitalize on several key components of hyper attention.  First is the ability to focus on multiple information streams, which comes from being able to shift perspective between different characters.  Secondly, the objects become interactive, in that the user must guide the narrative forwards by making characters move towards their destination (i.e. Ware’s actual drawing).  Furthermore, there are multiple points of attention, since the user must simultaneously propel all the different narratives forward by toggling between characters and checking if their story can continue at a given time.  Hopefully, the below storyboard brings these ideas to life.

1.  The current perspective is the girl’s.  In Ware’s original panel that this image depicts, the girl is pouring the detergent into the washer.  The user (the hand) swipes her across the screen until this image is shown, at which point this panel’s interactivity and narrative have been completed.

2.  The user toggles to Branford Bee’s perspective, whose current narrative is of the approach of the girl in the laundry room.  However, because the user has not reached the panel in the girl’s perspective where she opens the window, the user cannot “move forward” in Branford Bee’s perspective.

3.  The user toggles back to the girl’s perspective and moves through the panels until she opens the window.

4.  The user toggles back to Branford Bee, who can now escape.  In this 3 by 3 grid, the user taps one by one on each of the mini panels in order to move the narrative forward.

5.  By the end of the above 3 x 3 grid, Branford Bee is flying free and towards the drop of soda on the stair.  Thus, when the user toggles to the building’s perspective, we see the image of exactly this happening as Chris Ware depicts it.

Panel 1 comes from the game board; panel 2 comes from the back of the Branford Bee booklet (red cover); panel 3 comes from the game board; panel 4 comes from the Branford Bee booklet; panel 5 comes from the game board.

Note that the prequel to this narrative is contained in The Daily Bee (where Branford gets stuck in the house to begin with!) providing more fodder for the iPad app!

Experiment 6: Decomposition

If something is occluded, our imagination fills in it the endless possibilities of the hidden interior.

The figure from experiment 5 reminded me of paper dolls, but the most boring paper dolls imaginable. How to add content? Occlude.

For my final experiment, I chose to decompose both my 3rd and 5th experiments. In my 3rd experiment I took an inventory of a student’s trash can while in my 5th experiment I drew a visual proposal for my final paper. In this proposal, I hoped to depict the fatalistic message that I believe is conveyed through the story of Branford the Bee in Chris Ware’s  Building Stories . For those familiar with the two previous experiments, you will notice that the pieces of trash that I’ve used for this final experiment are limited to those found in my 3rd experiment (with the exception of a few small pieces of tape to help hold together the signs, and the markers to draw the signs and make the bloody napkin, all of which are shown below). The overall “map” also resembles the one drawn in my visual proposal. The “trash” for this experiment was not collected from the same student’s trash can. It was either bought (the Emergen-C and cereal), acquired from the dining hall (bananas and orange), or found in my own personal trash (the napkins, contacts, and receipt).

Some of the parallels include: – Banana = pathway – Emergen-C + water + contacts case = poison (Emergen-C and the poison are both chemicals! And the colors of the “poisons” match the headwear of Betty and the queen.) – Cereal boxes = Branford (his body is quite large) – Napkins and oranges = flowers (the oranges were also very fragrant) – Contacts “lid” + Q-tips = signs – Receipt = tombstone – Cereal = dead Branford (some of the contents of the cereal box poured out…) – “Bloody” napkin = more of dead Branford (I thought the suspicious red, potentially bloody, napkin from Experiment 3 nicely fit into the fatalistic idea so I colored a napkin red to resemble the original bloody napkin from Experiment 3)

In this final experiment I chose to reinvent two of my previous experiments by combining them in order to bring out some of the new developments in my final paper ideas since my visual proposal. In my final paper I hope to highlight how Branford’s story highlights the story and beauty of an unrecognized, quotidian life. As I explained in my post for Experiment 3, an individual’s trash reveals much about an individual’s life. Trash reveals more about an individual than he or she sometimes wants to or even can convey. We similarly gain a greater understanding of the protagonist through her story of Branford. I hope to argue in my paper that, like Branford, the protagonist feels trapped between two paths in her life (loving her family or turning towards her own passions, in the protagonist’s case) and as someone who is ordinary and unappreciated (like Branford in the hive). Although we see some of the protagonist’s conflict of interests in the rest of Building Stories , I believe that Branford helps articulate this idea that ordinary people have interesting stories and also helps to highlight the protagonist’s story. Furthermore, Branford’s story highlights how the protagonist tries to reaffirm herself of her self-worth and the importance of her actions. As a piece of supporting evidence in Branford’s story, I will cite the reference to Branford as the bacterium that is helping with compost and the growth of new flowers. Similarly, I believe that the protagonist believes that her actions have great worth and will bring new life (in her daughter) even after she dies. I try to illustrate this second idea of new growth through the banana peels. The peels represent the paths of Branford (or the protagonist) and although the two paths ultimately lead to the same dark ending, there is hope because these paths will (literally, as the peels compost away after being thrown away) lead to new growth.

Thanks for reading!

Visual Proposal

Extension of Building Stories — the Phil story.

visual proposal

A.K. Williams Annotated Bibliography

Berman, Margaret Fink “Imagining an Idiosyncratic Belonging: Representing Disability in Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories’ ” The comics of Chris Ware : drawing is a way of thinking / edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 191-205 . Print.

I’m looking to include this essay’s perspective on the ways that Chris Ware engages common conceptions of the ways that we understand social and physical spaces. The essay engages Ware’s grouping of the characters according to their physical proximity to each other and the ways that this tension opens up a tension between the ways that these characters engage and understand each other and themselves. I will use it primarily to speak to the ways that the physical and social forms color our understanding of emotion, selfhood and memory.

Ben Roberts(2006) Cinema as Mnemotechnics, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 11: 1 55-63.

This article speaks about the ways that philosophers have understood the relationship between memory, mnemotechnics and temporality. This essay deals mainly with the ways that human memory is understood as a cinema of mnemotechnics, and I will use it to inform my reading the way that Ware uses form to influence readers’ perception of temporality and memory in “Building Stories”

Sattler, Peter R. Past “Imperfect: ‘Building Stories’ and the Art of Memory. “The comics of Chris Ware : drawing is a way of thinking / edited by David M. Ball and Martha B. Kuhlman. Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2010. 206-222. Print. I’m interested in this essay’s discussion of mnemotechnics, observer and field memories and it’s analysis of William James philosophy of memory and selfhood. Mnemotechnic is a mnemonic that claims to help people retain information by constructing a physical space in their head and associating different concepts with different spaces.

Visual Proposal: Invisible People

*hint, zoom in!