Random
What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 1}
I’d always intended to write this series of posts, but kept putting it off.
Until now.
First, let me begin by saying that this topic is the focus of my doctoral research work. I’ve been actively engaged in the historical and critical study of issues surrounding this topic for about seven years now. Therefore, I have a shit ton of stuff to say about it. That said, I don’t want any of these posts to be overwhelming. My goal will be to introduce a brief, digestible amount of information for your consideration. I like what Kyle and Lily have been doing with their Geography Thursdays series: brief but compelling punches of thought. Sadly, I can’t promise to maintain their consistent frequency of publication, but because I like their model I’ll try to emulate the brevity.
I want to be clear: what I have to say is meant to start conversation not conclude conversation. I hope y’all will see that my intention is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, I will strive to identify tendencies, not truisms. I don’t believe in truth, I believe in interpretation. (God bless Nietzsche.) Thus, I do not pretend to be right; I only pretend to have ideas worth talking/thinking about.
Now then, the focus of my first post arises from a consideration of Lyn Hejinian’s concept of open and closed texts…
Hejinian opens her provocative essay “The Rejection of Closure,” first published in 1985 but originally delivered as a talk in 1983, with an epigraph from Paul Valéry’s Analects:
Two dangers never cease threatening
the world: order and disorder.
Change the word “order” to convention and the word “disorder” to experimentation, and we have the world of literature. These two tendencies, dualistic as they may seem, are indeed at the heart of the heart of the matter; but I think it ill-advised to consider the forces of order and disorder (personally, I like the Greek words better: cosmos and chaos) as binary poles on a literary spectrum. Rather, I like to think of them as haecceities periodically conveying various magnitudes of intensity. In other words, as independent forces that push and pull but never settle at a maximum polarization. This means there’s no such thing as “an experimental text” or “a conventional text,” only texts that tend toward experimentation and texts that tend toward convention.
One way of thinking about this idea of tending toward convention or tending toward experimentation is to think about texts as predominately open or predominately closed. Hejinian offers a nice tentative characterization of these terms:
We can say that a “closed text” is one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the “open text,” meanwhile, all the elements of the work are maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work.
To help conceptualize what Hejinian is saying, I’ll give two examples. The first is a comparison between two paintings I love by two different 20th century artists.
First, the closed text:
Edward Hopper - "New York Movie"
Notice how the elements of this closed text work to direct your reading. We have a legible setting, an identifiable character, and an implied situation. The scope of ambiguity in the Hopper painting is relatively narrow.
Now consider the open text:
Jackson Pollock - "Number 8"
Here we do not have a legible setting, an identifiable character, nor an implied situation. Instead, the elements of this text are maximally excited and thus the scope of ambiguity is relatively broad.
This comparison shows the contrast between a closed text and an open text, between a text that tends toward cosmos and a text that ends toward chaos, between a conventional text and an experimental text.
Let me close with my second example, this time I’ll use two literary texts I love by two different 20th century writers.
First, the closed text:
This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-law’s. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch.
The opening of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” is a great example of a closed text. Notice the way in which the elements of the story direct you toward a particular reading. There is a clearly identifiable narrator who situates himself in relation to other clearly identifiable characters. We can also easily identify a setting, as well as an explicit situation. The scope of ambiguity in this text is relatively narrow.
Now consider the open text:
The maw that rends without tearing, the maggoty claw that serves you, what, my baby buttercup, prunes stewed softly in their own juices or a good slap in the face, there’s no accounting for history in any event, even such a one as this one, O, we’re knee-deep in this one, you and me, we’re practically puppets, making all sorts of fingers dance above us…
This, the opening passage of Vanessa Place’s Dies: A Sentence, works quite differently than the Carver. Here it’s difficult to identify the narrator, let alone the relationship between the narrator and the person to whom the narrator is speaking. There does not seem to be a legible setting. As well, it’s hard to pinpoint the situation occurring. Instead, the elements of the text are maximally excited and thus the scope of ambiguity is relatively broad.
Hopefully, in this brief post, what I’ve shown is one (of many) ways to think about experimental literature. It’s a complex issue rife with controversy. Folks love to get pissed about how “there’s no such thing as experimental literature” or “the term experimental is outdated or ineffective.” I disagree. I think it’s important to think/talk about the two forces that never cease to threaten the world: convention and experimentation. It’s my goal to come up with tangible, helpful, informative ways to think/talk about this topic. Hopefully you’ll notice I’ve tried my best to omit value judgment from this analysis. I know that on previous occasions I’ve been, how should I say, priggishly vehement about my adoration for experimental texts and my disdain for conventional texts. Let this first post be my honest attempt to reach across the aisle, as they say about politics. I know that if I come across as an asshole no one will be interested in hearing what I have to say. I don’t want that to happen because I do think these things are important and I do want people to be talking/thinking about them. Maybe next time I’ll write a little bit about Aristotle and how the ideas he laid out in Poetics have come to underpin what we recognize as conventional literature today.
Thanks Chris. Looking forward to the rest.
I’m also interested in hearing your views on Alan Rossi’s comment about recognizable conventions.
uh, does the argument not seem black and white? i know chris says that he’s going to be working along the lines where the conventional and the experimental meet, but this post does not do that. what this post does is establish a very clear line, quite close to a black and white i would say, that differentiates open and closed texts. even how the post itself is constructed suggests this: “first the closed text” and “now the open text.” there’s little ambiguity or room for shifts in this post beyond the initial statement that there’s room for shifting.
also, if we’re already good with terms like closed and open and readerly and writerly, terms which can’t be devalued but which i happen to think aren’t of much use except maybe for the beginning literature student, why discuss them at all?
I like this idea of closed and open texts. What are texts that you read as open and closed at the same time? Is that possible, simultaneously moving towards the cosmos and the chaos?
Looking forward to the rest of the essays in this series, Chris. Thanks.
I’m happy for this series, and the regularish chance to live in your brain and learn about these matters Higgswise.
Question: Is one of the things you’re saying that ambiguity paired with disorder is a central hallmark of experimental literature? That seems to me to be a very narrow position. It seems to me that plenty of the literature we think of as experimental is obsessed with order, particularly formal order, and that much of what you’ve described as conventional literature is obsessed with ambiguity (which is, I think, an issue separate from clarity, which is something your piece perhaps alludes to but doesn’t tackle directly.)
i like the idea that texts aren’t necessarily “experimental” or “conventional”; that texts are playing with the two, that there’s a moveable spectrum or something. still, disregarding more mainstream, commercial writing, i don’t really like the terms “open” and “closed”, especially with closed leaning more toward conventional and open leaning more toward experimental, which is how the terms are posited here.
i worry about the fact that setting, character and narrator existing in a particular piece help to prove that a text is somehow “closed.” while i’d agree that that text (not necessarily Carver’s here, but I suppose I could make the argument with it) is conventional, i wouldn’t necessarily agree that it is closed. just because certain elements of a text are unambiguous (plot, narrator, setting), that doesn’t mean that the text as whole is closed (or less open). just because one text lacks these conventions, that doesn’t mean that text is any more open (or less closed); it simply means that text is playing by different (i don’t know the word) “rules” in comparison to conventional, easily recognizable rules. i feel that what this post is really pointing out is that Carver’s piece uses certain conventions, which we all recognize, while the other piece does not. as regards the Pollock painting, I would argue that the first time one sees such a painting, that painting may seem completely, endlessly, mind-bedazzlingly open; yet, after viewing ten or so similar paintings by Jackson, one begins to recognize Pollock’s own personal “convention” and, perhaps, the paintings begin to seem less endlessly open. i think the same argument can be made for experimental writers.
also, i like what kyle says here. feels like the post begins to open up these two terms, experimental and conventional, only to slowly let the terms slip back to their usual and polar spots – maybe this is your intention, to help establish the typical reading of these terms? it just didn’t feel that way from the outset, i suppose. i look forward to more of this series, and to see where you see the conventional and the experimental coming together.
Hey, Lincoln. Thanks for your response.
I have a difficult time responding to the issue of interpretation. I don’t really believe in it as a practice, to be honest. I don’t see texts as things that represent other things or mean anything; I see texts as being things in and of themselves.
Meaning, to me, is irrelevant.
It would be like asking: what does grass mean? What does a sidewalk mean? These questions are not as interesting or important to me as asking something more along the lines of: What does grass do? How does a sidewalk work? I look at texts the exact same way: as objects that do things.
The way I decipher the function of the object (i.e. the text) has to do with an identification of the elements exhibited by the object and an investigation of how the elements of that object perform certain tasks. Therefore, a text could be considered closed if the elements (the parts of the object) function toward a singular reading possibility, or open if those parts function toward a multiplicity of reading possibilities. Again, this does not concern meaning.
So probably I did a crappy job responding to your thoughtful comment. Sorry!
Thank you so much for this. Can’t wait to hear more from you about this topic.
An apt question. Consider Christian Bok’s Eunoia, which is both highly “experimental” and highly ordered (I’d argue, too, that the work is less open than other “experimental” texts… the themes are placed by Bok as a part of his system). Many works built on constraint or formal systems merely only appear chaotic but have emerged out of some well-ordered process. Then, ya, necessarily, you start to get into what exactly is the experimental bit, the process or product?
I think Kyle’s notes are appropriate, though. As Hejinian says, “Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness.” I think of open texts as those that (rather than describe them as ambiguous) defer authorial intention in favor of the meaning making done by the reader.
Hey Chris,
Great and interesting post. I hope you don’t mind if I play devil’s advocate a bit, but this relates to some stuff I was debating with a friend recently so it is on my mind.
I agree with you that experimental work–nay, great work in general–tends to have a lot of ambiguity and lends itself to multiple interpretations. I don’t think I agree that this necessarily has anything to do with the amount of identifiable “stuff” in the work though. Indeed, it might be the opposite. Shakespeare has probably been subject to more interpretations than any other author, yet his work is filled with identifiable settings, characters, etc.
What something like Shakespeare does is provide you with a lot of “stuff” to work with in your interpretations. On the flip side, I’m not not sure the Pollock piece is really that ambiguous as much as is devoid of “stuff”. It isn’t that it has mysterious characters, vague setting, and uncanny scenario as much as it has no setting, no characters, no scenario. It is a piece of abstract art that may create a mood in the viewer, in the way instrumental music would, but it seems less likely to cause discussion and interpretation than the Hopper (or a Dali or whatever). There is not a lot a, say, feminist or marxist critic would have to say about an individual Pollock painting (although they might have much to say about Pollack himself or his project overall [side note: I realize I’m probably going to get a barrage of links disproving me here]). One could debate interpretations of the Pollock as one could a necklace or a TV jingle or anything really, but you’d likely require external knowledge or have to impose a bunch of stuff into the piece that isn’t there (and you could do all that with the Hopper too, but the Hopper has its own meaning internally.) The Hopper has an implied narrative, the Pollock has no narrative, not an ambiguous narrative.
This isn’t to say the Hopper is more experimental than the Pollock, but that they are (as much as I hate to use the phrase) apples and oranges.
But I think that having discernible things in a work normally increases its ambiguity and “openness” in a more tangible way. When I spend a long time thinking and debating the meaning of something it is normally from an artist like Kafka or Magritte or whoever, and not a work of near pure abstraction. Most of that time poetry or art that works on that level seems to have no meaning, not an ambiguous one.
[edited to fix a typo]
It probably goes without saying that there is a point at which a work becomes closed to interpretation as the “stuff” becomes rigid and the meaning imposed, so the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.
Thanks Chris. Looking forward to the rest.
I’m also interested in hearing your views on Alan Rossi’s comment about recognizable conventions.
I understand this is a subject you’ve studied closely, but I hope you can focus on readability a bit more- you spent an entire paragraph, and a long-winded one, only to say “Things are experimental in degrees.”
yes, this is better than i could have said it (and tried to say it, above).
to add to Lincoln’s points here: take a text typically considered somewhat experimental. William gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, say. would we want to say that that text is “closed” because there’s a clear setting (Gilead, Ohio), there are clearly defined characters (Tott, Omensetter, Furber, etc), and because there’s a plot (a series of events causally connected that lead to Furber’s “change of heart”)? i don’t think anyone would call that book a “closed” text, and yet, in this small post, it seems we’d have to lean that way because it employs many of the “conventions” of traditional modes of writing.
Dear Christopher Higgs,
I hope you ignore Revelation1 16 above and completely ignore the issue of “readability,” since I don’t understand how it would enter this discussion at all.
In other news, I am grouchy because all of the students that have come in to use the copiers today are completely fucking annoying, and so I am going to pull a passive-aggressive move and pose questions regarding other people’s comments not in response to their comments.
Why, whenever this issue comes up (i.e. the tete-a-tete of experimental vs conventional, open vs close, readers vs writers, etc) is there an intense response that argues by positing that the initial argument is a black and white one? It’s not like the initial idea of an open vs a closed text is devalued because you can make a list of examples of [traditionally considered] conventional literature that also exhibits said characteristics.
And it’s interesting that the Hopper is, technically, an open form painting (what movie is playing?), and the Pollock implies more of a totality (or: the illusion of unconfined relevant elements). It seems conceivable, then, that a work can be experimental as long as it’s not so influential as to create a base form or a base experience of a form. And since someone brought up Gass, I know that “nothing necessarily follows from a given body of fictional text, and anything plausibly may,” so don’t take what I say about Hopper too seriously.
Chris can speak to this better than I can, but it seems like his posts often take a very strong position that invites those kinds of questions. One thing I like about this post is that it is a little less dogmatic.
My experience talking and debating with Chris suggests that these positions are often provocations, and in the discussion that follows, he’s willing to talk about the ways in which his position is complicated by the issues the questions raise, while at the same time maintaining a strong preference for the kind of literature he likes to challenge and position in opposition to everything else.
“white people”
Hey, Lincoln. Thanks again for your active engagement.
Here’s me taking a crack at how I might begin analyzing the Pollock in terms of its function rather than its meaning, maybe (hopefully!) it will give you an idea of how I would approach an open text, how I envision an open text presenting a multiplicity of reading possibilities:
It’s difficult to determine foreground and background. Initially, my impulse was to identify green as the dominate underpinning of the text, evidenced by its ubiquity and the recurring instances in which it touches the edges of the frame. Likewise, at various points it appears that other colors (red, black, white) all stand out as if on top of the green.
This is problematized, though, in the locations where it appears that yellow is actually underneath all of those colors as well as green. Furthermore, yellow appears less active than green, less directed and more static. This passivity of yellow also presents itself in the particular shapes that come to define its individuation, which I would characterize as blockish or lumpy.
Compare those yellow shapes with the dramatic movement of black swooping from top left out toward center down to bottom left and it seems apparent that black is the most significant element of the text. See the localized clump of black at top left and the elongated clump of black with various tendrils bottom left, mirrored by the nearly covered clump of black on the right third with a stiff line running up to the top of the canvas – this clump is covered by strings of green and blobs of white.
Perhaps the role of white may be the most significant element in this text because it appears the least, which grants it an air of mystery, an air of peculiarity, an air of uniqueness.
On the other hand, perhaps red or orange is the most underused color in this text and therefore red or orange should be considered the most significant.
I recognize that my assumption regarding the mot significant attribute is predicated on a privileging of uniqueness, when in fact one could easily argue that the most significant element is the most used element: black, or is it yellow?
uh, does the argument not seem black and white? i know chris says that he’s going to be working along the lines where the conventional and the experimental meet, but this post does not do that. what this post does is establish a very clear line, quite close to a black and white i would say, that differentiates open and closed texts. even how the post itself is constructed suggests this: “first the closed text” and “now the open text.” there’s little ambiguity or room for shifts in this post beyond the initial statement that there’s room for shifting.
also, if we’re already good with terms like closed and open and readerly and writerly, terms which can’t be devalued but which i happen to think aren’t of much use except maybe for the beginning literature student, why discuss them at all?
Hi, MG. Thanks for the kind words.
Instead of thinking about texts as being both open and closed at the same time, I think it might be helpful to think in terms of texts being in fluctuation between these two tendencies. Certainly there are texts wherein the dominate tendency can be identified as one or the other, but in most cases I think it’s a matter of fluctuation, a matter of variable intensification.
Hey, Kyle! Sorry for the delayed response (to you and everybody here) — I posted this and popped off to campus.
The issue you raise viz formal experimentation is certainly something worth taking into consideration and ripe for elaboration. As you can probably tell, I’m trying to back off my typical approach to this subject and not make definitive statements about what might or might not be “a central hallmark of experimental literature.” Instead, my approach here is (and will hopefully remain) one in which I present possible ways of thinking/talking about experimental lit. I am coming around to the position that my typical polemical tone alienates too many people to be effective. It’s one of my personal goals to try and back off the soap box and try to meet folks halfway. It’s something I have been attempting to develop as a pedagogical practice this year and it seems to be working much better (surprise, surprise!) So, yeah. Not gonna make the claim that Hejinian’s open and closed texts paradigm is the proper way of thinking about, or the conclusive way of thinking about, but simply that it’s one way to think about the difference between conventional and experimental lit. The main point, I think, right now at least, is to establish my position on the topic, which is to say that I believe there is a difference between these two tendencies and that it is worth talking about these differences in order to gain a better understanding of entire field called literature.
Hello, Moriahlpurdy.
You make a bunch of good points. The question of, or tension between, process and product is particularly relevant. And think it ties into the other really problematic issue you raise about authorial intention. Personally, I do not care about nor consider authorial intention when reading or teaching texts. It is my opinion that the text is the text and must withstand scrutiny on its own terms. Now, the relationship between the reader and the text is different, and is something I intend to discuss in another one of these posts that I will do on the difference between the Kantian aesthetic paradigm and the Hegelian aesthetic paradigm. For now, suffice to say, I think there are at least two radically different ways for a reader to approach the act of reading, one that befits a text that tends toward experimentation and one that befits a text that tends toward convention. More on that soon.
Experimental literature is what people write when a) they don’t have a story to tell, and b) they want to appear as intelligent.
Writing it is good, because you can always complain that no one understands you.
The problem is: most of the tricks were done 90-100 years ago. So where is the experiment?
Mind you, I have had stuff published in stacks of the “experimetal” venues. But the term “experimental” makes me feel rather unhappy.
experimental literature is what people write when they want to experiment with literature.
Hi, Alan. Thanks for your comments. Much appreciated.
You say:
To which I would remind you of Hejinian’s definition of a closed text:
One would be pretty hard pressed to locate ambiguity in the opening sentence of “Cathedral”
That sentence directs the reader to a single reading: there is a blind dude, he is a friend of the narrator’s wife, and he (the blind man) is fixing to come over to the narrator’s house and spend the evening. I don’t think a reader could find much ambiguity there. It is fairly closed, fairly directed toward a single reading. I suppose someone in an argumentative mood might snap back with: yeah, but they could be robots, to which I suppose I would concede, but otherwise, the reading is pretty univocal, no?
On the other hand, the opening utterance of Dies: A Sentence is not an utterance directed toward a single reading:
is opened toward a multiplicity of readings. What is the maw? The maw of what? What is meant by “rends without tearing”? Who speaks these lines? Where are they located? What is the situation in which the narrator is positioned?
These questions direct the reader away from a single reading, therefore opening the text.
This means no matter how many times one reads a text (or, in your example with Pollock — sees a text) the fact of its openness or closedness does not change. It’s not a matter of becoming conventional, as you suggest, because no matter how many variations of Pollock’s works you view, you can never approach Number 8 in a capacity to identify the elements in such a way as to direct your experience toward a single reading.
Thanks, Matthias! Your kindness is much appreciated.
Hi Christopher, I realize you are making your way through these posts but since this relates to mine I think what your analysis above misses is that that a story with more recognizable elements may open up meaning BETWEEN sentences or in other elements of the text (plot, character, philosophical meaning, etc.) that a more abstract text does not.
One could take a single sentence from Kafka and it may seem very closed and to only have one meaning. but said sentence is likely to be contradicted or complicated by other seemingly closed sentences in a way that totally opens up the text.
Similarly in the Hopper painting we may all agree that it is indeed a woman in the painting, but it opens up questions of what the woman is thinking, why is she there, what is the mood, etc. The Pollock is not really ambigious. You and I would agree that this splotch is a splotch and would not have a debate about what the splotch thinks or feels or even what it represents. it is just a splotch. We would likely have to retreat into a general conversation about Pollock’s place in art, his historical importance, etc.
I’m sure there are some that would say if I publish a book with only the word “Fiddlesticks” over and over that there would be some people that would try to “read” this text in a variety of ways, but I’m pretty unconvinced that it would actually have as many meaningful interpretations as a book filled with actual characters, actions, lines of thought and plot.
I enjoy this thread though.
(edited to fix Pollock’s name! d’oh)
Hey, Lincoln. Thanks for your response.
I have a difficult time responding to the issue of interpretation. I don’t really believe in it as a practice, to be honest. I don’t see texts as things that represent other things or mean anything; I see texts as being things in and of themselves.
Meaning, to me, is irrelevant.
It would be like asking: what does grass mean? What does a sidewalk mean? These questions are not as interesting or important to me as asking something more along the lines of: What does grass do? How does a sidewalk work? I look at texts the exact same way: as objects that do things.
The way I decipher the function of the object (i.e. the text) has to do with an identification of the elements exhibited by the object and an investigation of how the elements of that object perform certain tasks. Therefore, a text could be considered closed if the elements (the parts of the object) function toward a singular reading possibility, or open if those parts function toward a multiplicity of reading possibilities. Again, this does not concern meaning.
So probably I did a crappy job responding to your thoughtful comment. Sorry!
i think hejinian’s definition and using particular elements in a conventional story to prove that the entire story is “closed” is the exact problem. maybe i didn’t say this clearly enough: i don’t think that you can argue that because the first sentence of cathedral is unambiguous (or that setting is unambiguous or that character is unambiguous) that the entire thing is “closed.” i think that’s limited way to look at supposedly conventional texts and i think there’s a logical leap being made. if, in cathedral, the entire text directs itself toward a “single reading,” and if, in fact, someone found that “single reading” of cathedral, or any other text, i’d probably ignore it. same with the hopper painting, the pollock, or anything else, conventional or experimental.
granted, i have no idea what “the maw that rends without tearing” means. and granted, i see your points about the differences of these two texts. certainly we feel more grounded in a “real world” in cathedral. i don’t at all think this has anything to do with whether the text itself is “closed” or “open” though in its entirety.
Hello again, Alan.
You make a good point here w/r/t Gass. I want to reiterate that I don’t think it’s as simple as correlating the terms open = experiential and closed = conventional and then calling it a day. You are absolutely right to point out the way Gass complicated Hejinian’s paradigm. I do however think that we are getting somewhere when you notice that by the given parameters it would seem to suggest that Gass’s novel is a closed text — yet, at the same time, we want to claim it is experiential. This seeming contradiction highlights the unending complications that arise whenever one attempts to begin this kind of categorical explication. It also might tie back into Kyle’s comment above about experimental works that are also simultaneously closed or uber formal.
Very good, very good…thinking…thinking…
I guess I’m confused at how Pollack’s painting is at all ambiguous then? Outside of a debate of meaning, Pollack’s art seems to have clearly less reading possible than Hopper’s.
My point wasn’t really about meaning though, just that introducing the elements you are calling closed actually open up questions and ambiguity above there level of the word or sentence. You can’t have ambiguous action or character or setting without having action, character or setting, regardless of what those things mean.
Perhaps I just don’t understand what you mean by “multiplicity of readings.” Pick a Shakespeare play and it has been “read” in a hundred ways by different critics, at least as I understand the term.
Hello again, Lincoln.
We’re crossing posts, but I agree with you about liking this thread. Thanks for your contributions to it.
Again, I think the disagreement you and I are having arises from the fact that you are directing us toward the interpretation of the text’s meaning, while I am attempting to direct us toward the identification and extrapolation of the text’s functions.
If we get into a conversation about “meaning,” which I’m loathe to do, then it could go anywhere. But if instead we stick to a discussion of the elements on display and how those elements function: toward a singular reading (not meaning, but reading) in the case of Carver and toward a multiplicity of readings (not meanings, but readings) of the Place, then I think we could gain some ground.
side note: I like how you pointed out in a different comment the way these examples seem to be comparing apples to oranges. This will be the focus of another future post: the ways in which it helps to think about these differences in terms of differences in kind rather than degree — an issue that might also be contributing in part to some of the problems we’re seeing play out in the comment thread, which, I think is a good and potentially productive thing…
Yes! This is it!
The absence of action, character or setting is exactly what opens the text. Without those elements, the text functions in a kind of void. The void is by nature multiplicitious, without direction. The inclusion of those elements automatically instantiates a direction toward a particular reading.
Put it this way: if there is no identifiable character, then the identity of the character (or the identification of the absence of a character) renders the text open, that is, capable of functioning in various ways. If, on the other hand, there is an identifiable character, the the identity of the character (or the identification of the visibility of a character) renders the text closed, that is, capable of functioning in a singular way.
(Note again that these terms should more accurately be deployed as tendencies rather than truisms, i.e. tends toward closure or tends toward openness.)
Thanks, Igor. I’m not sure I adequately answered Alan’s question about recognizable conventions…will return to this…
Rev 1:16:
“And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth went a sharp two edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shines in his strength.”
That’s a pretty good one!
Tendencies, Alan. Tendencies. Not polarities. I very specifically stated:
The open and closed text paradigm should also be considered in this light: as haecceities periodically conveying various magnitudes of intensity. Not black and white at all. Shades of gray: darker gray and lighter gray.
Yes! I knew you’d step into the teacher’s lounge, Jereme :)
Ha, well we certainly have a fundamental disagreement here, because I”m saying that the absence of those things necessarily closes off most of the avenues of “reading,” like slamming shut doors in a long hall, until only one type of “reading” is possible.
And on a closer level, it closes off ambiguity by moving to a realm without anything to be ambiguous about.
For example, I still do not understand what these mutliplicity of readings of Pollock’s work would really be, especially in the absence of a discussion of meaning. It would seem to have no real readings. Its random splatters on a canvas. What is the ambiguity there?
I actually ask that sincerely and would love to understand what you mean, because I really don’t see any ambiguity in Pollock’s painting. What are the multiple ways in which Pollocks’ painting function that Hoppers’ does not?
Gunpowder was invented a long time ago.
Fuck yeah, M. Kitchell. I concur!
It’s sometimes impossible to have a meaningful conversation about this topic because of the tendency of some folks to pull the either/or card. I want to say it’s complicated and that trying to understand the ways it’s complicated is interesting and important.
Wanting to experiment and actually experimenting are not the same thing. Experiment implies doing something original. The fact that there is even a term “experimental” implies that anything under that heading is not original, because it has become a sort of genre. I can re-invent the already invented but in doing so can hardly claim originality.
Kyle makes a good point. My default position has always been provoke, provoke, provoke. This is my attempt at settling down…not sure how well it’s working out for me :)
Perhaps another way to put it is there seems to be a difference between an unambiguous thing (say a character), an ambiguous version of that thing and then the non-existence of that thing. To me, the ambiguous version of things is where the text/art opens up, not the non-existence of those things.
So I agree that Hopper’s piece is fairly closed, the things in it are not ambiguous (and trying to open it up by asking if she is robot is just silliness) but Pollack’s is just as closed or more so for not having anything in it to even be ambiguous (and attempts to create openness or ambiguity would probably be as silly as debating is the woman is robot)
Hey, Lincoln. Thanks again for your active engagement.
Here’s me taking a crack at how I might begin analyzing the Pollock in terms of its function rather than its meaning, maybe (hopefully!) it will give you an idea of how I would approach an open text, how I envision an open text presenting a multiplicity of reading possibilities:
It’s difficult to determine foreground and background. Initially, my impulse was to identify green as the dominate underpinning of the text, evidenced by its ubiquity and the recurring instances in which it touches the edges of the frame. Likewise, at various points it appears that other colors (red, black, white) all stand out as if on top of the green.
This is problematized, though, in the locations where it appears that yellow is actually underneath all of those colors as well as green. Furthermore, yellow appears less active than green, less directed and more static. This passivity of yellow also presents itself in the particular shapes that come to define its individuation, which I would characterize as blockish or lumpy.
Compare those yellow shapes with the dramatic movement of black swooping from top left out toward center down to bottom left and it seems apparent that black is the most significant element of the text. See the localized clump of black at top left and the elongated clump of black with various tendrils bottom left, mirrored by the nearly covered clump of black on the right third with a stiff line running up to the top of the canvas – this clump is covered by strings of green and blobs of white.
Perhaps the role of white may be the most significant element in this text because it appears the least, which grants it an air of mystery, an air of peculiarity, an air of uniqueness.
On the other hand, perhaps red or orange is the most underused color in this text and therefore red or orange should be considered the most significant.
I recognize that my assumption regarding the mot significant attribute is predicated on a privileging of uniqueness, when in fact one could easily argue that the most significant element is the most used element: black, or is it yellow?
lol
Nice post, Chris. I like your ideas here. I think both meaning and function overlap as they relate to convention and experimentation (as convention and experimentation overlap). The two are by no means mutually exclusive. Convention—in literature, politics, cultural tradition, religion, etc.—wouldn’t’ve been ‘solidified’ if not for experimentation. I think it’s possible a text can actually ‘appear’ so ‘open’ that it becomes ‘closed’ (just as the political spectrum inevitably circles back around on itself, so the farther left wing you go you actually become right wing—there’s no end to where this begins…) to the reader. I think it’s possible the more ‘open’ a text is, the less it offers itself up for interpretation of meaning or function. So, for an artist like Pollack, as Lincoln said, there’s not much to interpret in terms of an individual work. I wonder though, how function doesn’t relate to meaning, or how it fails to inform meaning. Grass or a sidewalk on their own mean nothing, yes, but depending on authorial intention (fallacy or not), they could mean many things and would then be both ‘closed’ and ‘open’: ‘closed’ as the author injects them purposefully into the text and open in the reader’s own projection of meaning onto the text. The fluctuation you discuss earlier would certainly allow for a pendulum swung between the purposes of meaning and function (the meaning of function, the function of meaning…).
Rather than trying to define works I think it’s helpful to talk about common characteristics. For example, I would be hard pressed to define poetry, but I can give you six or seven common characteristics and most poems will meet maybe four or five. Yet, just about anyone can look at a poem and know that’s what it is. One of the reasons this is true is because of the existence of conventions. I could have anything under the sun classifiable as a poem, a song, a painting, a piggy bank – and the reason it is recognizable for what it is, and the reason I know how to “read” the object, is because of conventions.
So your use of the term “conventional” is going to be confusing and it has your admitted biases built in.
I think the term experimental is just as problematic but you are well aware of this, so I won’t go there. My desire for clarity isn’t going to keep writers and readers from labeling works experimental and I will most likely have some sense of what they mean.
As for open or closed, the only way I can really see this being useful is by placing it in a framework of realistic versus abstract art. Your examples suggest this, since, if anything, they are classifiable as realistic and abstract, but I believe that’s not entirely what you’re after. Without seeing the whole article, my discomfort with open and closed is that it is focused too much on reading(s) as meaning / interpretation. Every piece of art is going to teach us how to read it. If the work tends toward what you are classifying as “conventional” the assumption here is that it will do so by employing longstanding conventions (here I would note that realistic and abstract works both employ longstanding conventions). Meanwhile an experimental work will stand in contradiction to the conventions of “conventional” works, and given that perspective alone, I would have a hard time terming these works “open.”
What makes the best sense to me is that the texts referred to here as conventional are closed in one sense and one sense alone, and that is with regard to the assumptions set forth by realism: the agreement that reader and text share a universal commonality, the real. Likewise, the best sense I can make of what you call experimental texts as open is that among the common characteristics of works of this type, they seem to put into question the assumption of a shared reality or the inherent value of representations of reality. So they are “open” to other realities or other versions of reality.
Again, I feel like what you are trying to discuss here isn’t as simple as realistic and abstract, but that’s the easiest way for me to make sense of it. And, after all, what I understand as experimental texts do tend more toward the abstract.
right. and yeah, i completely agree. this seems, to me, completely right and thank you and please more, but my only point here is that your examples had nothing to do this. if the above is your “thesis,” then your examples did nothing except show the polar opposites of closed and open texts, of order and disorder. if you were trying to show that it is “ill-advised to consider the forces of order and disorder as binary poles on a literary spectrum” than i would have rather seen some examples that showed that the forces of order and disorder can and do work together, in the same text (here, i would personally be thinking of William Gass).
it is complicated, like you say below, but i’m not entirely sure how your post shows that this issue is complicated. rather, it feels like the post is trying to point out to me that most conventional texts “tend” toward closedness and most experimental texts do not. and there, i have disagree.
Two colons! John was in his experimental mode there at Patmos.
Do you think the corners of his mouth got all sliced up when that two-edged sword popped out? Maybe the observer mistook the blood for sun shining in its strength?
i dont really think you demonstrated that it was complicated (if you were referring to the actual post, not things said in the comments)…
you chose two VERY different styles for each artform.
What if you took two abstract nonrepresentational paintings and tried to decide which (if any) were more closed than open, or vice versa, take two “scene” paintings and ask if either of them were more open than closed?
(a paragraph’s worth may not be enough to perform this exercise with writing).
Well sure, if someone sets out to make whatever their idea of experimental literature is, the result may be narrow or even derivative. And, yes, naming it is kind of silly, but that’s communication for you: awkward and lacking. I doubt the above-mentioned William Gass, for example, has written a book in order for it to be classified as a specific type of thing. Pure conjecture here, but I actually really doubt many good books of any classification (or genre or whatever labels like “experimental” or “good” are) were written for reasons as totally artless as your ‘because the author had nothing to say and wanted to appear intelligent’.
The claim (authors mumble and wear glasses needlessly) is really one-sided. Your argument is made from the audience. Just because you’ve read every book ever written doesn’t mean the writer has. People experiment. Kids touch dog dicks. Teenagers smoke drugs. Adult gingers try Indian food or something. Another way of putting it: I have only a rough idea of how you masturbate, but happen to think my masturbation techniques are truly amazing, BUT(!) perhaps you’ve ‘been there done that’ with regard to warm aloe lotion, my porcelain garage sink and a squish of Fast Orange hand cleaner in between my feet and the cold cement floor? Guess what? I’m not stopping!
Anyway, what I think Mr. Higgs is doing is walking a very wide circle around a pile of shit we might usually collectively call ‘experimental’ while blahblahing on about possibilities. You don’t really have to denounce something something he isn’t defending, or even pinpointing.
well there’s one of the major fulcrums — originality. if you’re not being so original, are you just being boring, closed, conventional? unless you write exactly the same words, nothing is unoriginal, right?
i’m not necessarily talking about reclaimed-text types of experiments (but we could, but that’s too easy). but take acrostics. i think if someone were to do an entire 300 page book of acrostics, i can think of a million ways that it could be done and still be considered a (successful) experiment. name me one poetic form to which (successful) experiments are just not available any longer due to an impossibility of being original/open/multifaceted/ambiguous/transluscent.
of course there are experiments that don’t go so well. a lot of experiments don’t go so well. maybe that’s why you’re unhappy about the word?
Rereading that, it reads as if I don’t care for or about what Higgs is doing here, which wasn’t my intention.
Of course someone can take something from the past and redefine it in a new way. And such a thing could validly claim to be experimental. But I haven’t really seen people in the “experimental” scene doing such things. Mostly it is ripping off a bit here, a bit there, dicking around with layout and so forth.
Also, the real damning thing that I can see, is that the authors who really were experimental (Faulkner) also told good stories and had something going on that I really don’t see in the “experimental” fare offered today.
Yes, I am being hyper critical. Probably not really addressing what you are saying either…getting late brain drifting.
Darconville: No, I understood (stand) what you were (are) saying.
You are correct, an “experimental” author doesn’t need to have read every book out there.
I do disagree about the smart thing. I think people like to think they are smart, and no one more so than the flowering “experimental” author.
Me: “Why don’t you try publisher x with your manuscript?”
Experimental Author: “No, they are too commercial. They wouldn’t understand it.”
I am quoting verbatim here.
It is an authors duty to know what they are doing, just as it is a plumbers to know how to unclog your drain. Want to experiment? Great. But first why not see what other people say 100 years ago were doing. Maybe check out a few futurists. Maybe read a few surrealists. Diderot? Could be worth your while. Jean Paul Richter? Yes.
I am not bashing Mr. Higgs for posting this. A few years ago people would ask me what I wrote and “experimental” might well have come up in my stumbling, blushing, vomiting response. I also see he isn’t defending it or anything else, just setting up a forum for conversation….And I guess that is what I am attempting here, as far as this awkward form of communication will permit.
But couldn’t you do a similar analysis, of color and brushstroke, to any painting, such as Hopper’s? One can spend a long time talking about the brushwork of a painting like Hooper’s and the use of color, light, shadow and perspective…Is blue the most significant because it is in the dress? Or is the key use of red on the lamps and such more alarming. etc.
But then you have the additional material of a character, a scene, a mood and so on to analyze. (which also allows you to re-analyze the color and strokes in light of the scene)
This is why it seems more open to me.
i like that statement about faulkner, why not be both?
and, (whispering) i have hardly seen anything that’s blown me away in writing.
AND, do things really even need to be experimental? In BB’s post about Burroughs, Steven asked people to tell the authors that first made them excited, and I was too embarassed to say anything, because my first “wow” was more of an idiosyncratic stylist than an experimentalist. Most people wouldn’t call an author’s style which is real and uncontrived “experimental”; it’s honest, and i find that kind of stuff (like suicidal Romantic composers, for instance) to be incredibly profound and inspiring and open, even though the form such honest artists work with is quite rigid.
really, it’s rare to find good, successful, meaningful art, when we’re here in the HTMLtrenches, same goes for open mikes, zines, etc. We’re in a river of shit, and it’s wide, and it’s hard to see any other floating kayaks when you’re paddling in it. Gosh, especially those of us who don’t live in cosmo cities.
My brain’s been drifting all day long, don’t worry. My past few comments haven’t even been my usual flowery “why not” prosody poem-comments.
Yes, I think that is the key: Some piece of writing or art, music, anything, that actually is exciting, or meaningful in a real way. Experimental or otherwise.
Maybe in fact that is why the word bothers me, as do all the genre terms, since we get so obsessed with all the language “about” writing, that we forget the reason it exists: as a form of communication.
Anyhow….off to bed now…
i’ve been trying to find a place to squeeze in here how my entire life opened up (to art) because of the band Sonic Youth, during their mid-90’s shimmer/drone/slow/improv/clean-tone period, with “Washing Machine” and “Anagrama”… and although everybody does, I try hard to not call them experimental… STOCKHAUSEN was experimental. And you know what, Stockhausen sounds like shit. YUCK. But they found a way to open up the vocabulary of music based on all those postmodern composers. and anyone who’s heard “Anagrama” will undeniably say that that song is GORGEOUS, spiritual, transcendent.
So it’s not the trope of the experiment, it’s what you do with it. But then besides “wow i like that, it’s very different from everything else i’ve ever experienced”, what the hell can we call that music? i usually just pile on enough hyphenated adjectives so that it can’t possibly be turned into a genre. I have a developing personal philosophy of “labellessness”. (I can’t believe I just double-suffixed that, gross.)
I wasn’t talking about brushstrokes, I was talking about the elements. Can you talk about the elements of the Hopper painting the same way? No. Why?
The difference, the crux, emerges at the very moment when you say:
See how you’ve closed the text? You have given a singular reading to it: a dress. You have identified something that closes off possibilities. It is a dress. This cannot be avoided. And since it cannot be avoided, the text has closed itself into a reading that identifies that particular instance as a dress.
Similarly, there is a character. This cannot be avoided. Therefore, the text has closed itself toward a singular reading of that element in that instance, too.
What it seems like you’re trying to get at is something that I would consider steps removed from where I’m attempting to locate my analysis. You’re keen to talk about the representational shapes and how those shapes conjure a more open reading of the text, but what I’m saying is that the moment these shapes come into focus you have already begun to move toward closure.
first of all, it’s nice to see some people thinking and talking about this stuff. keep it up.
so could we sum this up?
Chris, does the position you outlined look something like this:
a text is an object; an object like a lawnmower or chair. but a text, a book, is a specific kind of object that is available for ‘readings.’
what’s a reading? well, it’s how we, the readers, read/interpret the book [is this correct?]. And so, with any object, with any text, there are lots of different readings: ones that are quite standard (take initial ‘reading’ of the Hopper) and ones that are somehow ‘deviant’ (like making the supposition that the woman is a robot; etc).
But (and here’s where it gets tricky) there are also, running with Hejinian, two kinds of texts. Ones that are ‘closed’ and suggest a standard reading (like our standard understanding of Hopper); and ones that are ‘open’ where there is no readily available standard interpretation of meaning/ reading.
Does this sound right?
If so, I’ve got some questions:
1. what’s the difference between a reading of Hopper and one of Pollock? In your analysis of the Pollock, it seemed to be a reading that could be widely accepted. And indeed the reading of Hopper seems like we would readily accept it too. If so, then is it the difference between representational and non-representational art (a la Walton)?
2. Can we really do away with meaning like the way you suggest? It feels weird to just do away with the concept. It seems like we then collapse the difference between a lawnmower and a text. Is this desired? I guess we could take the context route out of this but doesn’t this, in the end, rely on meaning? (Think of Duchamp’s urinal and its context in the art world. Doesn’t this, in the end, rely on some form of meaning, i.e. within the art world?)
3. What are some other ways to understand what experimental lit? I guess they’ll be in more posts.
Thanks for your time.
We may just have to agree to disagree, because to me you’ve only proved my point. Your discussion of the Pollock is extremely closed, a small room in which you have to strain to even wriggle. The Pollock’s text is so devoid of content, much less ambiguity, that one can’t even get to the room with the dresses.
This is why I asked about ambiguity, the term used in the Hejinian quote. Where is the ambiguity in the Pollock piece? There is none, and your readings did not read any ambiguity by discussing which color was dominant.
Similarly, there is a character. This cannot be avoided. Therefore, the text has closed itself toward a singular reading of that element in that instance, too.
Yes, but the corollary in the Pollack, some small splatter, has NO real reading. There is nothing to read into it and attempts to do so sound even more strain than attempts to say the woman might be a robot.
Perhaps I’ve focused too much on the paintings though, as your argument makes more sense in the literary examples given.
To jump of your quote once more, the Pollock painting has NO character. Therefore, the text has closed off that type of reading as much as the Hopper closes itself off by having a definite character.
This is what I meant when talking about the three categories: Definite character, ambiguous character, and no character.
Very very interesting. Experiments always co-existed with convention (well it’s perhaps a banality), and in my opinion the most intense are those pieces of experimental art, which co-relate and co-respond with con-vention, even if (or especially because) they anihilate the traditions. Dadaists, for example, saw the decay of the convention and invented new forms, but without this convention new forms were unthinkable. Berliner Dada even didn’t think about it, since their idiosyncrasy was too high to analyse the own urges. Schwitters in opposite played with traditions and conventions, was hated both by Berliner Dada and traditionalists and was – in my eyes – one of the most powerful dudes in the history of historical avantgarde (after Burger).
I am very interested in your researches, since I write my dissertation about Dada and love to exchange here with people like you. When is “What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 2}”?
Oh I’m here. Listening and learning.
Doesn’t stop me from thinking “white people” and laughing.
I said I wouldn’t get into it about “experimental,” but I’m thinking more about your use of “conventional” and since you’ve got it set up as in contradiction to “experimental”…
In my post above I’m wondering if there’s a direct relation to realistic vs. nonrealistic works, and below Shane seems to raise some of the same points with respect to “representational” vs. “nonrepresentational.”
I guess what I’m wondering most about is that I would see “conventional” and “experimental” as relational. What is seen as conventional or experimental depends a lot on the time period, the culture, the genre, etc.
As I’m sure you are well-aware, realism and experiment aren’t necessarily directly opposed. Zola, Conrad, Hemingway, Stein – they all wrote realistic texts that were experimental. We don’t think of realism as experimental since realism is the dominant form and has been for some time. But the conventions of realism were also once experiments.
You use the example of Jackson Pollock as if it existed outside of time and convention. As if anyone would see that painting as necessarily experimental. How would it have been seen in a non-Western culture or at a time before the conventions of realism were standardized?
And so it seems taking the next step, identifying works as “open” or “closed” with respect to interpretation, requires too many assumptions. Essentially, the system of classification is only worth considering if it is useful. Even if experimental vs. conventional could be clearly articulated, what would be the benefit of defining representation as open or closed, esp. since it might also be loose or loaded terminology?
Hi, John. Thanks for your thoughts.
I argue that conventional and experimental literature are categories that are transhistorical and transcultural (within western or occidental cultures). As my next intended post will outline, convention was established by Aristotle in 335 BC. From 335 BC to November 19th 2010 AD, the same convention applies. What is experimental is that which experiments with Aristotle’s convention. Full stop.
“Realism” is not synonymous with conventional. Realism is a historically and culturally contingent category. I also intend to elaborate on the concept of realism in a future post, but for now suffice to say: realism is a genre.
Conventional literature is not a genre. Experimental literature is not a genre. These two categories are akin to the distinction between transcendence and immanence. More on that, as well, soon.
Shane! Good to hear from you here.
Okay…
Yes, in these examples (which are admittedly polarized — the goal being to hopefully show the margins toward which the closed and open tend), there is a distinction between representation and non-representation.
I think reading the Pollock requires a different set of reading strategies than reading the Hopper. It’s not a matter of the reading being widely or narrowly accepted, it’s about utilizing different methodologies. Texts that tend toward the open ask us to consider different aspects than texts that tend toward the closed.
Since we can identify the character, the setting, and the situation in the Hopper we have a different way of engaging with that text. We can talk about it in terms of it’s representational qualities and how those qualities function — but this act, in and of itself, is an indication of the text’s closed tendency — closed to ambiguity because legible articulations a determined.
Since the Pollock doesn’t present representational elements, we have to engage a different set of reading strategies. Since we cannot talk about it in terms of it’s representational qualities and how those qualities function, we must find other ways to talk about it. And this fact — that there are no legible articulations — is what constitutes the tendency toward the open — because the elements are indeterminate.
Perhaps a more effective way of positing Hejinian’s open/closed is to say determined/indeterminate.
Can we do away with meaning? Yes. God, yes! But I better not go too much into this, lest I begin ranting about how I consider the desire for meaning to be the greatest of human flaws.
Context is different than meaning. Context is a salient subject here. Does context rely on meaning — no! Duchamp’s urinal becomes art at the moment when it becomes useless. So long as the object has utility (i.e. can be used as a urinal) it is categorically distinct from art. Art is that which is useless. Useless here being defined as that which serves no practical purpose beyond the excitation of the free play of one’s imagination.
Yes, I hope to elaborate other ways of thinking about experimental lit in future posts.
Thanks for YOUR time! This, for me, is pure pleasure.
Hi, Merzmensch. Thanks for your comments. I’m actually teaching a course next semester on the European Avant-Garde from 1900-1945. Dada will certainly play a major role.
Hi, Lincoln.
I mentioned this in my response to Shane below but thought it apropos to your last response —
I’m thinking about the two paintings in terms of determined and indeterminate elements.
The Hopper presents determined elements: the woman, the dress, the movie theater, etc. Determined = closed.
The Pollock presents indeterminate elements: colors and shapes. Indeterminate = open. It is open because it has not yet been determined.
The differences here also correspond to different reading strategies required for engagement with the texts. Determined (closed) texts require a set of reading strategies that take into account the representational elements; whereas indeterminate (open) texts require a set of reading strategies that take into account the non-representational elements.
Your comment that the Pollock “has NO real reading. There is nothing to read into it” is again a return to this desire for there to be something “in” the text that you’re searching for (i.e. meaning). Notice my reading of the Pollock: there is nothing “in” the text. Everything is “on” the text. In other words, I’m not looking to uncover some hidden mystery that needs unlocking. I am identifying the elements and elaborating on their function. The elements in the Pollock are indeterminate, therefore it is open. The elements in the Hopper are determined, therefore it is closed.
But yes, you’re right, literature probably works better, and maybe our focus on the paintings is causing us to tangle our arguments rather than smooth them out. It’s super fun to discuss, though. And I always appreciate conversing with smart thinkers like yourself. Cheers!
Hey, Eric! Thanks for your thoughts. Much appreciated.
Meaning is certainly a nuisance to me.
You raise the issue of authorial intention. This is another of my intended topics for future posts in this series. I don’t want to give away too much just yet, but suffice to say, what you say here is worth discussing for sure.
Aristotle was responding to libraries of criticism that no longer exist and what we have of his works were in reference to epic poetry. The terminology existed long before Aristotle and crediting him with their influence is like saying King James wrote the Bible. Fiction, nothing close to it, existed then. Fiction is itself a historical phenomenon that’s only a few hundred years old.
If you intend “experimental” as transhistorical – good luck with that – you’ll be working against the very word itself.
Hi, John. Unfortunately, you are incorrect on so many counts I haven’t the time here to correct you. It’s obvious you don’t know much about the subjects at hand: neither Aristotle nor (for some weird reason) the word experimental itself. Also not sure what you mean by the use of “fiction” and your assertion that it’s “only a few hundred years old.” Did you suppose Homer’s Odyssey was not a fiction? Did you suppose it was a history? Are you confusing your Homer with your Herodotus? If so, let me assuage you: the Odyssey was a fiction. It wasn’t a history. But thanks for offering me good luck!
To jump in late – sure, one could talk about the locations of yellow and blue in the Hopper painting without using words like “dress”. Why not?!
And how is it that “dress” is less ambiguous than “swooping” or “tendrils”??
(I think Lincoln’s point is that Pollock’s painting doesn’t allow for this descriptive flexibility – that, therefore, Pollock’s painting is the one more ‘closed’ to readings, because it generates a more limited range of possible readings.)
Can’t the “character” questions be avoided by a Hopper-viewer as they were by the Pollock-painter? Are people less unfettered in looking at paintings than painters are in painting them?
The reader can’t choose to read “blue” without reading “blue dress”? That, to me, sounds like a closed reading of reading itself.
Mike, as he points out to Alan (below), Chris emphatically qualifies his polarity of ‘open/closed’ with tendency – as though the poles themselves have no verifiable existence, and are ideals transcendentally deduced – falsely or truly – from an empirically determinate spectrum. – which is helpfully pragmatic, eh? Many evaluations – all? – occur in the absence of purely substantial telh (finalities; immanently final be-causes). (An evaluation would be no less concrete for the poles between which one is ‘seeing’ – placing? – the object being notional.)
A useful word for the fluctuation that texts undergo/exert between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ is shimmer. A text shimmers open and closed, but a single, poor mind – or a plural, rich one! – ‘holds’ it in a region more one or more the other.
brendan, you’re just saying this in order to appear intelligent
[hey – that’s an easy pseudo-criticism to make – and fun, too]
Hi Chris.
If you are really interested in having something of value to say, you are going to have to address these questions instead of dismissing them and me. You are anchored in terms ripe for deconstruction.
When it comes to my understanding of what people call “experimental” literature the primary distinguishing feature is the position of the narrator. If you want to compare it to what Homer was doing, as “conventional,” you are sailing off in the wrong ship.
It’s a good introduction to the series, Chris – perhaps too judicious!; certainly not not enough. (strong-position taker does not = “asshole”, except to the fearfully faking-it)
Because they’re not to be taken dogmatically, I think the conventional/experimental and closed/open spectra are quite useful. Another way of figuring a similar poleless polarity is imposition/discovery (thanks to Stevens).
(I’d have stayed away from the painting analogy, though; words have built-in disambiguation that color, shape, and texture (especially in non-representational art) don’t have. A red circle can represent a lot of things – or, as you say, nothing other than itself, a red circle. The word “apple” is over-determinedly representative. Even if one says, My apple puckers teddy-bear nonchalance., the apprehending mind is, as always, already reading ‘possession’, ’round fruit’, ‘sphincter-like tightening’, ‘zoomorphic toy’, ‘indifference’ – and relating these semaphores into a syntax-determined pattern.)
I do wonder at your boogey-word meaning. You say:
and
I don’t see how “reading” is different, in practice, from “interpreting”, or “a reading” from an “interpretation”. Pure empirical determination?? – the letters, next to each other without ‘spaces’: a – p – p – l – e , as opposed to the sign “apple”?
Chris, I don’t think signification is something desired, but rather, something constitutive, a condition for the possibility of perception (and, as humans experience it, of desire), a context in and by which one finds oneself ineluctably constituted.
Is it the “desire for meaning” that you find so objectionable, or the desire to control meaning – especially for others? The latter is a tricky one: even for the most generous, flexibly-minded person, is there really some other way to have a conversation?? or, indeed, ‘to entertain’ a thought?
yes. especially the swooping and tendrils line. to add to this: how are colors in pollock indeterminate? yellow. yellow. yellow.
i just want to reiterate that i’ve enjoyed this conversation. chris, lincoln, and now deadgod are making for some serious fun comments to read. my main problem with the initial post was that (while i understood chris was aiming to elucidate “tendencies,” not polarities) the examples seemed overly polarized and uncomplicated. i think the happy part of this conversation is that we’ve opened up ideas about all these texts: they’ve been discussed in a less polarized way, more in line with Chris’s idea that all texts, to use deadgod’s term, shimmer toward/away from open and closed. it’s happy and important that we can see some “closed” elements in the pollock, and i think lincoln suggests we can read some “open” elements in the hopper or carver.
Sorry, John. I just wrote a huge long angry response to you, but have decided not to publish it. Suffice to say, I’m certain that my future posts will help you to learn more about experimental literature. Good day.
“Experimental” doesn’t necessarily equate to “original.”
Scientific experiments are only valid if they can be reproduced precisely. Techniques from “experimental” cinema, music, lit, what-have-you are frequently seized upon to incorporate in new “conventional” works. I don’t think anyone would be interested in experimental art if it didn’t involve such settling of the frontiers – I think the true value of the “experimental” is firmly tied to its replicability, just as it is in science.
Thank you Mr. Higgs! A thoroughly enjoyable post and excellent responses to comments, too. I eagerly await #2.
PS, I find “open” v. “closed” to be very useful and I’m glad you plan to steer clear of “meaning” (‘humanity’s biggest flaw,’ I agree)
[…] What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 1} (Education – Friday 19 Nov.) […]
Oh this is wonderful. It’s great that students will learn more about European Avant-Garde and especially Dada! If you need some material, drop a message. I was in Cabaret Voltaire this summer and did some pictures of interieur. I also did a video, which I hope to edit and post (even months after my visit). So if you need some assistance, feel free to ask.
Hey Chris,
I see what you’re getting at. I still wonder about the context comment tho. It seems to me there is still some form of meaning going on here, namely a functional definition of meaning. No?
Did you ever have a chance to look at that Mimesis as Make Believe book? I think it’d be a good one for your project.
I would’ve loved to give some trenchant, deeply considered response to this article, and the comments, but seeing as it’s about to disappear, I’ll just give you my own feelings on just the term “experimental”, whether or not they’ve already been echoed. (Please forgive me for not reading through all these comments, since they’re extensive and the topic is about to disappear.)
First: For anyone who hasn’t heard me say it already (I say it a lot) — I hate hate hate the word “experimental”. I can’t stand it. It’s an insult. It’s deliberately derogatory. It means “This work isn’t a true literary work, it’s merely an experiment. It has no value. It doesn’t matter. Just ignore it.”
It’s a term concocted deliberately and precisely to marginalize literature which is not of whatever style is currently considered to be “mainstream” or “traditional”.
So… instead I use the words “nontraditional” and “progressive”. These are not the same, however.
Nontraditional: Any work, ‘mimicked’ or ‘original’, that differs from what can be seen or described as “traditional”.
Progressive: Any work which, in some way, says or creates something new which has the potential to at the very least put a thoughtful image or sensation in people’s heads and/or at the very most create a change in literature. Additionally: the way I see it, simply being honest to the self and therefore honest in voice will often develop work which is progressive… but if this fails then I’d think this would usually do so if the author is not a practiced writer.
[…] installment of my series “What is Experimental Literature?” coming soon! blog comments powered by Disqus […]
[…] I mentioned last time, the goal with this series of posts is to start conversation not conclude conversation. I want to […]
[…] part one, I proposed that one way we might begin to think about experimental literature is in terms of open […]
Not exactly timely, and I’m not even sure how relevant it is, but: my most recent “reading philosophy” is that, as a reader, I GET to read everything openly. If I enter a text–no matter how closed it seems–with as blank a state of mind as possible, I don’t have to be “burdened” by an author’s intent. Not to say that I ignore the obvious, but if the focus isn’t on “getting it” on the author’s terms, it often opens up new and strange appreciations I’d have overlooked otherwise. I think creativity in criticism can be just as useful (and fun, incidentally) as creativity in writing.
[…] his first post, Christopher wrote that there is no such thing as an experimental text but rather there are texts […]
Wow.
I was starting to realize it in the other thread, but this post just cemented it: I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a text being open or closed before, and I feel like everything I was taught always assumed every text was closed. Even in the class where we read Barth, the goal of the classroom discussion was figuring out “what ‘really’ happened.”
I know that probably sounds ridiculous, and now that I’m thinking about it more, it’s hard to imagine the open/closed dichotomy not having always existed right in front of my eyes. It just really never occurred to me, and so the reason I thought I hated experimental literature was that (since I assumed all texts were closed) I felt like the authors were deliberately obfuscating whatever the “correct” interpretation was, like they were trying to trick me or just “show off.”
The visual examples were also really helpful, because it made me see that the kind of “leeway” I have given paintings–I had a great art teacher in high school who turned me around from the “that’s crap/my kid could draw that” line of thinking–and films (I love, love, love David Lynch and thanks to a post on DC’s the other day love the film Ma Mere now, even though it’s so horrifying)–I withheld from literature without even realizing I was doing it. Like I have managed to be stupid enough to be posting on this very site about how I only like stories with clear characters/plots even as I defend abstract painting or recall enjoying Un Chien Andalou.
Thank you so much for this post, and I genuinely look forward to reading the rest in the series. I really wish I could take one of your classes. (I wish I were back in school period, and hadn’t fucked up the graduate school admissions process… reading posts like these reminds me how much I miss education, even if mine has [as I’m realizing lately] been a bit botched.)
[…] In a way, I think this echoes my attempt at explaining experimental literature in terms of Hejinian’s opened and closed model. I’m currently reading Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy, which opens […]
Okay, I am late to this post and this website in general but I really enjoyed this post. I haven’t browsed through the comments yet, short on time here, but I would like to share this image that was brought to my mind:
http://oi48.tinypic.com/2gw5biq.jpg
It’s a merge of the closed and open texts. I think this visually represents what I am most interested in currently. I’m not sure what it would be called other than a merge or compromise of the two.
I look forward to reading the rest of these articles.