Craft Notes
Hypothesis: Collaboration and Alienation
There is a split in experimental fiction, it would seem, which is hardly a split: a duality which is hardly dual. Articulating it, in addition, will not add to or subtract from what I’m provisionally calling “experimental fiction.” I am not going out of my way to break open or unmask a binary which has, till now, subsisted in relative silence. The following is a brief and incomplete diagnosis–neither positive nor negative, or else both at once. Most importantly, perhaps, these are not two distinct regimes (again, a split which is hardly, or is not, a split). Nor should this be taken as a statement of fact, but as a condition which I’ve begun, more and more, to see in what I read.
Collaboration and alienation are the two modes or strategies of writing–of reading, too–between which the history of experimental fiction might be located. The first strategy is easy enough to identify. The collaborative mode is characterized by open possibility–a collaborative text insists on an active reading for adequate dialogue. Indeed, it is the work of dialogue, of reader-become-writer. The collaborative mode–I almost wrote mood–is Proust’s past which explodes into the future, the fragments of which must be collected by the reader. Ulysses, whose polyphonic framework requires much sorting and sifting. B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, an overlooked but seminal work of metafiction whose chapters–loose pamphlets–can be read in any order (save, notably, the first and last). Carole Maso’s Ava, which demands that the reader write between the lines. Infinite Jest, whose significance in this regard should be obvious enough–it is perhaps the upshot of this entire tradition. But the latter is related intimately to a novel which very subtly skirts and ultimately transgresses the boundary of what could be considered a collaborative work.
This novel is William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. The Recognitions is a remarkable novel. For all of its poetry, for its preciosity, which would disguise it as conventional, The Recognitions emerges in 20th century fiction as a novel displaced, disintegrated, and at war with itself. Its motor force is a tension between the elegance of its language and the vitriol, the destructive and self-destructive will, of its elements. Language and elements: this unique novel profoundly hates its characters while investing its very depth in their presentation. Its status as a watershed moment between high modernism and postmodernism–as a nontraditional work of fiction–is due to this complex schism at its center, between an icy distance from its characters, and a desire to render them fully, if not exhaustively. Again and again The Recognitions foregrounds the social and economic relations which constitute its characters as the only possible relations, yet collapses the border between art and life–so to say that it simultaneously judges its characters didactically, and makes them beautiful in and through language.
The novel’s ending manifests this contradiction, but does not dissolve it: the work of art murders its parasite, that is, the one who has given it life, and at the very same time, itself. The piano piece collapses in on the player (literally: a character plays a piano piece inside of a church, and the church collapses on and kills him)–the player no longer fades into the work, couples with it, but is violently cut off from it. In the end, the artist or performer is at once what makes the work possible and its condition of impossibility. The work of art can now be located only as different from itself, as a function of the artist (reader/writer/performer) who never simply intertwines with the work, but who activates its destruction and his or her own. The work becomes dangerous, unstable, sacrifices its characters to the power of its image, which does the same. To affectively present its characters–their genealogies, their relations–the work must die, and take the “holy reader” down with it. We now meet the novel which repulses its reader, the narcissistic novel which wills the crossing-out of its own reflection.
The work of alienation mirrors the relation of time which I described above in connection with Proust, who, it will have to be said, does not altogether fit into the collaborative strategy: an infinite past which collides with the future and creates a memory for the future. But the fragments which scatter are not collected or recollected–represented–by the reader. They consist in presentation; the audience puffs cigars and talk amongst themselves during the performance, but are not drawn into it. This same movement can be traced, for instance, in the fiction of–and I can hear the collective sigh at his mention–Gordon Lish. In Lish’s work, we see the production of a past that never was, which is continually created anew: the contraction and explosion of fragments which the reader cannot collect, but which the reader can contemplate as a collision, as the creation of a memory for the future. This movement is Lish’s hostile, repetitive, insistent voice, for whom memory, the “I” itself which can write, is a production of the “as if”: the beating heart of time. Let’s think of Bataille. The alienating voice becomes the sun, or that which will be consumed in its own fire. But only in order to create. Create what? The possibility of creation. A silence which would permit one to sing. Not the synthetic unity of collaboration which gathers together parts, but a paradoxical unity–the one which is multiple, which explodes, contracts, explodes and contracts. Alienation produces a new moment: the moment in which the work unveils itself as a performance, and in the same instant, unveils life itself as such. The entire history of literature is suffused with this performance; it is the rare work which owns up to it.
Tags: b.s. johnson, carole maso, proust, William Gaddis
This is why I read HTML Giant. Thank you, Alec.
This is why I read HTML Giant. Thank you, Alec.
‘He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, though seldom played.’
‘He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, though seldom played.’
How do you account for work that enforces collaboration – the reader interacting with the text and supplying it with new meanings – with a mind to alienate a reader from their prior reading tendencies? We might think of William Burroughs cut-up novels in this way, in fact there is a treatise on this kind of reader and this kind of text called The Third Mind. It is precisely the collaborative face entailing alienation.
Then, of what of texts at war with themselves, seemingly opaque to reader interaction, that lives like an Event, that leaves the reader in a changed state and thereby asks to be diagnosed ie that the critical consequences of the work be left to interact with? And then of course there are those texts that are alienating via a collaborative face, and then those texts that have an ugly, paratactic face that end up inspiring an interaction after-the-fact.
I think you analysis is keen but I raise these points to highlight what for me is an indubitable blurring, leading me to a question I’d like to ask of experimental fiction as it exists. Why is it the moniker experimental has been confused with the term avant-garde? Certainly there are experimental fictions that are avant-garde, in fact, one is hard pressed to not call an experimental piece avant-garde. But not every avant-garde work is experimental.
I find it fascinating that you’d call Proust fragmented. I’ve only read Swann’s Way, so I’m no authority, but I will say that in all of its leaps in temporality it is perhaps one of the most consistent, blended, undulating pieces of literature I have ever read. Moreover, I would like to say that I find the narrative voice so saturating, and consequently the world of Combray, the Bois du Boulogne, etc, seemingly without disconnectedness from each other. The madeleine becomes the narrator, becomes the aunt’s house, becomes tea in the aunt’s house, becomes the estate, becomes the church in Combray, becomes Combray. One example of many.
And this is why I like to take the word experimental seriously, and literally. I would prefer to call experimental fiction that which attempts an experiment. Which, rather than the organic infallibility in sensibility of a Proust, clearly declares its experiments, like Calvino, Burroughs, Bulgakov, in some ways Beckett (but I feel he truly marries experimentalism with opacity of execution, one dares to find the bones of the structure), Angela Carter (the short stories), the nouveau roman, Oulipo. I feel it’s more useful, if we are to use the term, to call such people experimental writers. Some writers that might be called avant-garde like late Ashbery, Nabokov, Proust, Pinter, and Genet are, for me, hardly experimentalists, except in regards to this history of literature. Now that would be a different point.
So I don’t mean to disrupt your interesting question, but I wanted to follow your thoughts into the territory that your thoughts led me. Taste wise, I bend towards the marriage of your apparent dualism. Cheers for your energetic curiosity, Alec, it’s well appreciated around these parts.
How do you account for work that enforces collaboration – the reader interacting with the text and supplying it with new meanings – with a mind to alienate a reader from their prior reading tendencies? We might think of William Burroughs cut-up novels in this way, in fact there is a treatise on this kind of reader and this kind of text called The Third Mind. It is precisely the collaborative face entailing alienation.
Then, of what of texts at war with themselves, seemingly opaque to reader interaction, that lives like an Event, that leaves the reader in a changed state and thereby asks to be diagnosed ie that the critical consequences of the work be left to interact with? And then of course there are those texts that are alienating via a collaborative face, and then those texts that have an ugly, paratactic face that end up inspiring an interaction after-the-fact.
I think you analysis is keen but I raise these points to highlight what for me is an indubitable blurring, leading me to a question I’d like to ask of experimental fiction as it exists. Why is it the moniker experimental has been confused with the term avant-garde? Certainly there are experimental fictions that are avant-garde, in fact, one is hard pressed to not call an experimental piece avant-garde. But not every avant-garde work is experimental.
I find it fascinating that you’d call Proust fragmented. I’ve only read Swann’s Way, so I’m no authority, but I will say that in all of its leaps in temporality it is perhaps one of the most consistent, blended, undulating pieces of literature I have ever read. Moreover, I would like to say that I find the narrative voice so saturating, and consequently the world of Combray, the Bois du Boulogne, etc, seemingly without disconnectedness from each other. The madeleine becomes the narrator, becomes the aunt’s house, becomes tea in the aunt’s house, becomes the estate, becomes the church in Combray, becomes Combray. One example of many.
And this is why I like to take the word experimental seriously, and literally. I would prefer to call experimental fiction that which attempts an experiment. Which, rather than the organic infallibility in sensibility of a Proust, clearly declares its experiments, like Calvino, Burroughs, Bulgakov, in some ways Beckett (but I feel he truly marries experimentalism with opacity of execution, one dares to find the bones of the structure), Angela Carter (the short stories), the nouveau roman, Oulipo. I feel it’s more useful, if we are to use the term, to call such people experimental writers. Some writers that might be called avant-garde like late Ashbery, Nabokov, Proust, Pinter, and Genet are, for me, hardly experimentalists, except in regards to this history of literature. Now that would be a different point.
So I don’t mean to disrupt your interesting question, but I wanted to follow your thoughts into the territory that your thoughts led me. Taste wise, I bend towards the marriage of your apparent dualism. Cheers for your energetic curiosity, Alec, it’s well appreciated around these parts.
reading the last paragraph, i started to feel that the difference between the two modes is one of depth vs. flattness (mean non-pejoratively) in terms of how all these fragments — of consciousness, time, space and so on — are dealt with; to throw another metaphor into the heap, the collaborative is a camera that moves through space, he alienated is a zoom which flattens and magnifies.
beckett is maybe an intermediary figure between the two modes.
could you break down this “owning up” in the last line? also, i’m gonna echo corey on proust. maybe say more about the cigar puffing crowds? fitting for the raoul riuz film of time regained, but it’s not clicking for me with the novel itself.
i really have to read the recognitions. i’ve read his other novels, but never that one, which i understand that one is a whole nother thing.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8C4HL2LyWU
reading the last paragraph, i started to feel that the difference between the two modes is one of depth vs. flattness (mean non-pejoratively) in terms of how all these fragments — of consciousness, time, space and so on — are dealt with; to throw another metaphor into the heap, the collaborative is a camera that moves through space, he alienated is a zoom which flattens and magnifies.
beckett is maybe an intermediary figure between the two modes.
could you break down this “owning up” in the last line? also, i’m gonna echo corey on proust. maybe say more about the cigar puffing crowds? fitting for the raoul riuz film of time regained, but it’s not clicking for me with the novel itself.
i really have to read the recognitions. i’ve read his other novels, but never that one, which i understand that one is a whole nother thing.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8C4HL2LyWU
Re: Proust, I read Proust as this explosion of memory. But I haven’t read him that closely and the only reason he came up in this post is because he’s been popping up in a lot of what I’ve been reading lately. The madeline never tasted that way to Proust as a child. He relates the madeline to how it may or may not have tasted in the past, and with the fragments of that past, produces the possibility of relating to them in the future, i.e. in the reflected present, which it would seem is simultaneous with the represented past. It is the movement of contemplation which then guarantees a future, but a necessarily fragmented future. I’m going to bed, but I look forward to responding more to everyone tomorrow.
Re: Proust, I read Proust as this explosion of memory. But I haven’t read him that closely and the only reason he came up in this post is because he’s been popping up in a lot of what I’ve been reading lately. The madeline never tasted that way to Proust as a child. He relates the madeline to how it may or may not have tasted in the past, and with the fragments of that past, produces the possibility of relating to them in the future, i.e. in the reflected present, which it would seem is simultaneous with the represented past. It is the movement of contemplation which then guarantees a future, but a necessarily fragmented future. I’m going to bed, but I look forward to responding more to everyone tomorrow.
Maybe I’ve stumbled upon something worth your elucidation. First of all, as interesting and plausible Proust’s own madeleine moment is as a manifold of fragments in HIS past, what he does with them is of course our point, our concern. That relating of fragments of the past to the future, if one is to relate their reading of Proust to this wonderfully complete picture of the writer’s methodology, a productive gesture, produces a kind of glue, does it not? Mortar between these bricks of memory? You must be very cautious with your use of the words ‘fragmentary’ and ‘fragments’ because the terms speak of a disunity, of parts, if arranged in a manifold, of a combination that is ill-deported to unity and instead deporting itself as a vessel of non-interconnecting fragments. Calvino’s nodal meta-narratives in ‘If On A Winter’s Night…’ have this aesthetic, this arrangement. Proust’s madeleine moment, as explosive as it might be, is perhaps a little more like a chemical compound, rather than a pataphysical table of elements, a continuity, an edifice is made of a concatenation, of a chain of descriptions of differing levels of mnemonic significance and relevance to the totality. It is most certainly explosive, but it is explosive because it is a successful arrangement of elements that so arranged excites a conflagration. Where there is fire, there is smoke, but when one declares that fragments attend an explosion one must decide what object, edifice, or site has been exploded. I see something highly welded in Proust’s writerly sensibilities. It is his modernism that I see as an anti-experimentalism, aside Flaubert, that looks at the world before it looks at words. Not to say this is the best path, as I’ve said I have a relationship to all sorts of avant-gardes. But it is the austerity and self-confidence of a writer like Proust that seems to look for radical sensibilities in the world, and for that aestheticism to be our discipline as human beings. Perception is his concern and so requires a flowing, not a fragmentary, approach. I find that even if I were to agree with your position that the future is ‘necessarily fragmented’, an unsubstantiated claim, although potentially fascinating, Proust’s approach as a writer is in fact a highly binding one of involuntary and voluntary memory, of one’s milieu now and the same milieu of the past (and their cohabitation). His technique, I argue, is one the reconciliates the fragmentary, desultory nature of memory and its persistence in the present, with one’s notion of a cultivated perception (or sensibility, but with Proust, better referred to as sensitivity, since it is so radical) and venturing forth into the future of sensation. His is a writer’s encounter between perception and the perceiver’s renegotiation of its problems.
Maybe I’ve stumbled upon something worth your elucidation. First of all, as interesting and plausible Proust’s own madeleine moment is as a manifold of fragments in HIS past, what he does with them is of course our point, our concern. That relating of fragments of the past to the future, if one is to relate their reading of Proust to this wonderfully complete picture of the writer’s methodology, a productive gesture, produces a kind of glue, does it not? Mortar between these bricks of memory? You must be very cautious with your use of the words ‘fragmentary’ and ‘fragments’ because the terms speak of a disunity, of parts, if arranged in a manifold, of a combination that is ill-deported to unity and instead deporting itself as a vessel of non-interconnecting fragments. Calvino’s nodal meta-narratives in ‘If On A Winter’s Night…’ have this aesthetic, this arrangement. Proust’s madeleine moment, as explosive as it might be, is perhaps a little more like a chemical compound, rather than a pataphysical table of elements, a continuity, an edifice is made of a concatenation, of a chain of descriptions of differing levels of mnemonic significance and relevance to the totality. It is most certainly explosive, but it is explosive because it is a successful arrangement of elements that so arranged excites a conflagration. Where there is fire, there is smoke, but when one declares that fragments attend an explosion one must decide what object, edifice, or site has been exploded. I see something highly welded in Proust’s writerly sensibilities. It is his modernism that I see as an anti-experimentalism, aside Flaubert, that looks at the world before it looks at words. Not to say this is the best path, as I’ve said I have a relationship to all sorts of avant-gardes. But it is the austerity and self-confidence of a writer like Proust that seems to look for radical sensibilities in the world, and for that aestheticism to be our discipline as human beings. Perception is his concern and so requires a flowing, not a fragmentary, approach. I find that even if I were to agree with your position that the future is ‘necessarily fragmented’, an unsubstantiated claim, although potentially fascinating, Proust’s approach as a writer is in fact a highly binding one of involuntary and voluntary memory, of one’s milieu now and the same milieu of the past (and their cohabitation). His technique, I argue, is one the reconciliates the fragmentary, desultory nature of memory and its persistence in the present, with one’s notion of a cultivated perception (or sensibility, but with Proust, better referred to as sensitivity, since it is so radical) and venturing forth into the future of sensation. His is a writer’s encounter between perception and the perceiver’s renegotiation of its problems.
while it’s been a long while since i read The Recognitions, i do remember the scene (on the deck of a boat?) where somebody (the protagonist?) says “The only thing you need to write a book is an encyclopedia and a thesaurus,” – hence Gaddiss’ use of archaic and arcane language throughout – which further supports your theories of collapse and repulse – thanks alec –
while it’s been a long while since i read The Recognitions, i do remember the scene (on the deck of a boat?) where somebody (the protagonist?) says “The only thing you need to write a book is an encyclopedia and a thesaurus,” – hence Gaddiss’ use of archaic and arcane language throughout – which further supports your theories of collapse and repulse – thanks alec –
Great piece.
Great piece.