Random
What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 2}
Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin
To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess:
Having commenc’d, be a divine in shew,
Yet level at the end of every art,
And live and die in Aristotle’s works.— Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604)
One way to think about experimental literature would be to consider it in relation to conventional literature. Which begs the question: what is conventional literature? The answer to that question is much easier than the answer to the titular question of this post. The answer is this: conventional literature is that which follows Aristotelian prescription. Plain and simple. So if you want to know what experimental literature is, you might begin by considering it to be that which deviates from Aristotelian prescription.
Brian Evenson illuminates the problem of Aristotle’s suffocating influence in this great essay called “Notes on Fiction and Philosophy” in this amazing collection of literary criticism called Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (SUNY Press, 2008), at the beginning of which he suggests:
[T]o move to an understanding of late twentieth- early twenty-first-century fiction, the first step is to move out of the fourth century BC: to let go of the Aristotelian notions that still dominate most thinking about fiction in writing workshops today…Discussions of setting, plot, character, theme, and so on, their parameters derived from Aristotle, seem hardly to have advanced beyond New Criticism’s neo-Aristotelianism; and when a workshop student says “I didn’t find the character believable,” usually the model for believability is firmly entrenched in nineteenth-century notions of consistency that have probably less to do with how real twenty-first century people act (not to mention nineteenth-century people) than with specific, and often dated, literary conventions.
I’d like to use this quote from Evenson as my jumping off point.
What Evenson is pointing out is that western literature is predicated on a master narrative, a collection of assumptions that have become naturalized to the point that many forget that the conventions with which we take to be self-evident are actually the product of intellectual construction. The most basic of these assumptions is that a story requires a beginning-middle-end. This ternary structure is not a truism, it is the codification of a concept written by Aristotle. Likewise, the seemingly fundamental idea that literature is inherently mimetic is again not a product of some transcendent truth, but the product of Aristotle’s inscription in the opening lines of what is inarguably one of the single most influential texts ever written: Poetics.
Should you find yourself unfamiliar with this text, I highly recommend spending the two hours it will take you to read it cover to cover. I think anyone who is or wants to be a writer owes it to themselves to know where their assumptions about what makes for “good writing” comes from. They come from this book. Here are just a few examples:
Show don’t tell
Avoid the deus ex machina
Kill your darlings
Characters should be recognizable, unified, consistent, believable and relatable
Plot should be unified
Plot is the most important aspect
The difference between story and plot (causality)
The need for a reversal/recognition in which the character changes (epiphany)
Should evoke fear/pity (i.e. rely on emotion)
Story consists of complication and resolution (conflict)
Clarity over ambiguity in language
Plausible impossibility is preferable to an implausible possibility
As I say, these are just a few of the conventions that pop out at me as I flip through my heavily marked up copy of Aristotle’s Poetics (I use the Malcolm Heath translation, the Introduction to which is quite helpful for understanding how Aristotle’s concept of poetry as imitation is consistent with that of our concepts of fiction.)
I believe experimental literature presents an alternative-discourse to Aristotle’s master narrative. Notice that I have very specifically chosen the word “alternative” to modify the word “discourse.” This is because I do not believe experimental literature to be reactionary, which is to say negative. Experimental literature is not Against Aristotle, not anti-Aristotle, not Anti-convention, not Non-Aristotelian. All of those ways of rendering experimental lit place it in a subordinate position. I do not believe experimental literature is subordinate to conventional lit. I believe they are mutually affirmative positions with differing affinities, desires, impulses. They are not in binary opposition because placing two items in binary opposition suggests a thesis/antithesis or positive/negative dialectic. Again, I do not view experimental lit as negative or antithetical.
What I am proposing is that one way to think about experimental literature is to conceive of it as that which experiments on/with Aristotelian prescription. For example, Aristotle suggests “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end” (13). Joyce takes this model into his laboratory and experiments on it, the product of which, Finnegans Wake, suggests that a whole can actually exist without those clearly discernible chronological markers.
Many more examples could obviously be offered. As well, a history of how Aristotle’s Poetics came to such prominence could also enrich this discussion. I hope in future additions to this series to elaborate on the lineage that brought Poetics through the ages to our doorstep this morning: from Horace to Hegel to Freytag to John Gardner to Jonathan Franzen. But, for now I’ll stop here.
As I mentioned last time, the goal with this series of posts is to start conversation not conclude conversation. I want to raise awareness and get people thinking/talking about a subject I care about. My intention is therefore to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Most importantly, I do not pretend to be right; I only pretend to have ideas worth talking/thinking about. Perhaps next time I will take up the issue of meaning and its relationship to literature: the ways in which conventional literature rely on meaning and the ways in which experimental literature resist meaning.
Grrrr… . Mind the word “experimental”, people!
Anyhow… my definition of “traditional” or “conventional” has always been pretty simplistic (based on simple observation) : whatever styles are traditionally or conventionally or commonly celebrated can be judged as traditional or conventional.
But the Aristotelian connection is a really interesting one and I’ll have to explore it. Thanks, for that, Chris.
I am thinking this idea might be a structural model for an entire workshop. Having students read and discuss Poetics, as foundation. The reactions to any student story would be addressed as Aristotle assumptions versus not Aristotle assumptions.
But my mind thinks about these Aristotle assumptions don’t appear as arbitrary. What is the system that has brought them forward, that has codified them as “good,” my mind now thinking about how a bible is formed, what books, what books left out…
This is the end of the semester and my mind already own the next, so I find this fascinating. I don’t mean to frame this in pedagogy, but I have. It is finals week. I am immersed.
Thanks for this one
Ah, you teachers… always coming up with new mind-torture devices for your students… .
…Call me masochistic, but I sort of wish my teachers had tortured me this way.
I’m happy for this conversation & this series of posts. Keep ’em coming, Chris.
Aristotle’s Poetics refers more to functional narrative (drama) than “good writing,” which is more the realm of Rhetoric–persuasion, eloquence, etc. I would suggest that the work did not spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus to determine the literary conventions of human history. Our notions of causation, significance, epiphany, and meaning are derived from human consciousness and identity, and were present long before Aristotle. Poetics affirms the tendencies of the human mind to impose structure onto events. The beginning-middle-end is not codified by Aristotle but a simple expression of the way time and related events are organized (birth-life-death, morning-noon-night, etc.) by cognition. Humans impose narrative on their lives to understand where and who they are, and how this came to pass. These are created from selected significant experiences that somehow provide meaning (the truth of which takes a back seat to the function it serves for identity). Fiction is often an illustration of this cognitive process. These significant events depend on a great deal of context and related emotion, and therefore what seems like a simple conventional process is in fact very difficult to convincingly recreate in fiction. When a workshop student says “I didn’t find the character believable,” they are not necessarily clinging to dated literary conventions, but possibly finding the story’s elements difficult to understand when compared to the internalized narratives from which they formed their own identity. We impose meaning in the form of narrative to our lives as a hedge against bewilderment and despair, or at least to inform and explain bewilderment and despair. Most narrative fiction is a reflection of this impulse. The divide between formal concerns and subject matter/content isn’t a matter of primacy, as I see it. “Experimental Writing” seems to me, as you said, not a refutation of any paradigm but an exploration of other avenues and purposes to writing. Poetics, however, isn’t the entrenched guidebook it’s made out to be here, as much as it is an expression of the way people naturally (and reductively) create story to generate “meaning.” That is, in part, why it came to such prominence.
This feels like a binary to me, Chris, even though I know you don’t mean it to be. I think it’s the labeling, “experimental” and “conventional.” Gaddis rejects the term “experimental.” Also, I think it’s the implicit pressure or influence this line of talk can exert on writers if they passively accept the concept that they are writing from one of two traditions. (Am I unconsciously following Aristotle because I have, recognizably, characters, with qualities and imaginable mannerisms? Ahh! Am I writing from emotion? Shit, I must not be experimental like I thought I was). I’m sure that’s not what you intend, but I’m just saying, in a way it seems you’re attempting to discuss (and inadvertently codifying) what is experimental literature. I know you’re discussing, but while discussing, you’re laying out identifiers, and I’m not saying that’s wrong, I’m just saying that encourages writers to second-guess their impulses, their bliss, or, there’s that word again, their emotion.
I found the Handke bit Baumann quoted in the other post more compelling as a general approach to thinking about this, recipe-makers vs. those who do a controlled letting-go, sometimes out of emotion. I don’t believe in labels and I don’t believe in Good and Bad in art, but I think that discussing what writing feels good and satisfies and why is maybe more helpful than discussing whether something belongs to a tradition or not, especially a tradition that is to stand alongside one other big giant tradition.
Just off the top of my head… Cheers, Chris
Great summation.
Aristotle was a master of identifying patterns of cognition & behavior. The structure of conventional narrative, or Story, is a concise emotional journey that has enough emotional payoff (enough value as entertainment, parable, social glue & information) to replicate and exist in nearly all cultures. It’s a pattern that most brains have evolved to respond positively to. Tough to shake it. I can’t speak of Poetics’ influence on future storytellers, and I’m really looking forward to that lineage, but I’d prefer to say that it’s not bucking Aristotle, it’s bucking our own hardwiring. (as slightly as we can)
Excellent & exciting post.
Also interesting: Joseph Campbell’s admiration & obsession with Finnegans Wake.
Also, this from Campbell: “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives becomes dissolved.”
Which reminds me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s thoughts on the importance of the sacred & profane.
it does surprise me a little that that’s been your experience, but then all programs/departments are different. i think i was lucky to be in a very “liberal” department when i was getting my MA, exploring experimental lit in almost all my classes in some way.
also, i don’t see an “equality between these two tendencies” at all, but that’s my lazy writing about the idea. certainly some texts display more experimental tendencies, etc.
anyway, these posts are great. i’ve looked forward to this second one. i’d write more but the semester ended the other day and that means i’m hungover and can’t type another word.
it does surprise me a little that that’s been your experience, but then all programs/departments are different. i think i was lucky to be in a very “liberal” department when i was getting my MA, exploring experimental lit in almost all my classes in some way.
also, i don’t see an “equality between these two tendencies” at all, but that’s my lazy writing about the idea. certainly some texts display more experimental tendencies, etc.
anyway, these posts are great. i’ve looked forward to this second one. i’d write more but the semester ended the other day and that means i’m hungover and can’t type another word.
it does surprise me a little that that’s been your experience, but then all programs/departments are different. i think i was lucky to be in a very “liberal” department when i was getting my MA, exploring experimental lit in almost all my classes in some way.
also, i don’t see an “equality between these two tendencies” at all, but that’s my lazy writing about the idea. certainly some texts display more experimental tendencies, etc.
anyway, these posts are great. i’ve looked forward to this second one. i’d write more but the semester ended the other day and that means i’m hungover and can’t type another word.
I think, rather than considering it a binary, chris is approaching the word “experimental” (for want of a better word, which I think he’s established before) w/r/t to the idea that meaning is differential. since language is abstracted, and because we can only define things by other words, to actually get at meaning we have to establish what something is by showing what something is not.
&&&I mean this is basic post-structuralism, so if you already know this I wanna clarify that I’m not trying to sound condescending or anything?
I’ll reply to my own post just to say that I started reading De Poetica (I hadn’t realized it was on my shelf), but fell asleep reading it.
I’ll finish that 44-page monster one of these days!
i think i know what you mean, mike, and unfortunately, yes, they made me take theory. if i am understanding you, you’re saying “chris isn’t establishing two camps, he’s saying exp. lit. is not [these things associated with conventional lit]” i may not be phrasing that how you or chris would, but i think we’re on the same page.
still, whose assumptions of “good writing”? and why is “good writing” being conflated with what describes conventional literature? many works that nearly anyone would call experimental or some similar adjective have been called “good writing” by mainstream critics and conventional lit authors, including Modern Library’s #1 for the 21st. Similarly, many books that I don’t think people would call experimental lit. do not follow many of those conventions. The assumptions of good writing named here, and implied as being markers of conventional lit and not exp. lit, remind me of what is taught in academic writing workshops, and certainly what Kakutani and those writers who buy into workshops and Kakutani et al. would say, but I don’t think that the bulk of conventional or exp./whatever writers over the years would agree with or followed all or even most of those conventions.
Joyce created characters that would pass the conventional lit. taste test, and he had epiphanies in all of his books, including Ulysses (the end, for starters) and Finnegans (the end, again). Yet he played form and was a progressive and experimental author, if you want to call him that. So is only Finnegans exp. lit. according to you?? I’d just say he seems masterful and impressive and moving and inspiring to me (“good”). I’d say that about Melville too… Beckett… Woolf… Salinger…etc. But are they experimental? Melville wouldn’t seem to be in the experimental…almost said camp. Doesn’t seem to belong in exp. lit.
Not trying to be annoying. My point stands, I think, as far as practicality and outside the world of discourse, abstraction. Defining exp lit. won’t help me write “better,” I don’t think. But maybe this discussion is meant to be strictly academic/theoretical???
or maybe it’s meant just to like help ppl think about this shit? so to speak.. that could be helpful :) k… haha… maybe that’s the whole point. i think i just “bristle” at ppl telling me i “cant” write from emotion/have characters who aren’t cyphers/”layers of the embodied zone poetic” or something… or else i’m lame/Franzen/sentimental
also, question: If Chris isn’t setting up a binary, and he isn’t saying that this (what we’re calling exp. lit) is better than that (conventional lit.), then what is the point of defining exp. lit? This is also a tradition? That’s the point?
k, maybe i’m unintentionally being annoying… carry on, or w/e haha :)
Why say that narrative is “imposed”, rather than ‘discovered’, or ‘constitutive of self-understanding’?
nice post, Chris, and fun comments. the only thing i’d quarrel with in the post itself is the implied notion that experimental lit might now be considered “subordinate” to conventional lit. that maybe is the case, i don’t know, in a barnes and noble (and if so, who cares). but i don’t think most serious writers believe experimental lit to be subordinate. in fact, i think i’d make the argument that today, among more serious writers and readers (by serious i guess i mean not-so-mainstream), experimentation is highly valued. i think that oftentimes, at least in my experience, overly conventional writing is often in the subordinate position (in that it’s become a “lesser” form) among serious writers and readers.
also, i’m sort of with stephen here. while this categorizing is certainly helpful for a student who’s becoming interested in literature, it always feels like terms like experimental and conventional just break down for me whenever i read stuff now. good writing plays with both, must.
I don’t think The Poetics were, for Aristotle, “foundation”. His texts are the record of ‘class notes’ and public lectures, possibly as recorded by himself, probably as recorded by some undisentangleable mixture of himself, his students and interlocutors, and the first couple of generations of people who had them after his death. They record some, but not all, possible objections along the ways of countless skeins.
It’s not rational, from the point of view of The Philosopher, to consider Aristotle’s texts as treatises – they’re too open to contest for that – , though their appearance in the Roman world and subsequently has certainly been in the form of authority, as was “Aristotle: The Philosopher” – as Chris rejects.
As concretizations of a mind (several minds – a community) teasing apart and reforming itself at work coming-to-understand: unbeatable, and unbeatably initiatory. As Final Words: not then; why now?
That is subtle Aristotelianism.
To predicate of something what it “is” and “is not” in a dogmatic way, with empirical determination following from categorical definition, has often been called Aristotelian.
But for empirical determination to lead, in the manner of questioning terms, categorical predication is, in my view, more accurately “Aristotelian” Aristotelianism – as with Aristotle’s struggle to figure out whether sponges are ‘animal’ or ‘plant’.
To de-dogmatize one’s commitments that underlie one’s predications is, in my view, actually-Aristotelian Aristotelianism.
‘Is chronological consistency in narrative imposed by storytellers, or discovered by them?’ would be an Aristotelian question, in my understanding.
Hey, Sean,
I think your idea to base an entire class around Poetics is right on the money.
When I teach fiction workshop I use three books:
Aristotle’s Poetics
Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses
Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space
To me they are the holy trinity for beginning writers. You introduce them to those three works and I contend they will slaughter.
whoa, i just got an email that deadgod responded to my comment but i didn’t get an email about your response, weird
i think it’s sort of theoretically, or at least attempting to establish a framework for so-called experimental work to be discussed within.
and i think the marginalization addressed is more via the hegemony, not, obviously, within these tiny contexts where clearly people are reading, probably, as much ‘experimental’ work as ‘conventional’ work.
i mean, as it is with anything that’s marginalized, i think the idea is that, yeah, it’s cool that there are people reading and talking about it at all, but wouldn’t it be even more awesome if you could go into a borders and pick up arno schmidt? the people who aren’t obsessively looking for new amazing shit to read online aren’t going to wander into a commerical book store and accidentally stumble upon something that’s largely distanced from what chris is calling ‘conventional’ literature, and so these people will not be looking for anything different, and large/mainstream publishers will continue to not give a shit about.
i mean, my entire journey down the road of lit came when i read about HOUSE OF LEAVES in some weird rave/electronic-music magazine, and i was like 13 years old and it fucking blew my mind that you could do stuff like that with words and shapes. so, because i accidentally discovered the tip of the iceberg, i wanted to dig deeper. i think the idea is that it would be pretty awesome if there were more ways to access this stuff, and that’s where the marginalization element comes in.
i mean, in high school i was obsessed with joyce after doing a ‘research paper’ on portrait of the artist, but all my professor would ever say about ulysses was that it was the most difficult book ever, and finnegans wake never got mentioned. & even still, finnegans wake sits on the shelves of borders as an anomaly, there for the curious & the academic to easily pick up (though i still insist it’s a book more people have on their shelves than have read–christ, i haven’t even read more than 10 pages of my own copy).
i think i sort of lost my train of thought here, but yeah, i don’t think you’re wrong, but i do think this kind of stuff is more than worth talking about.
Thanks, Kyle!
deadgod. your comments are just such good mind spaces to be in. i very much admire and enjoy.
Hi, Geoffrey,
Although I think we agree w/r/t experimental lit being an affirmative exploration of alternative pathways, I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that “The beginning-middle-end is not codified by Aristotle but a simple expression of the way time and related events are organized (birth-life-death, morning-noon-night, etc.) by cognition.”
This is exactly the kind of thinking I am here attempting to dispel. Your position is predicated on the assumption that there exists some kind of transcendent human nature, what you describe as “human consciousness and identity.” I find this train of thought problematic, to say the least.
I also disagree, obviously, with your assertion that Poetics is not the entrenched guidebook I have made it out to be. As I intend to show in future posts in this series, when studied carefully literary history proves fairly conclusively to point to the fact that Poetics has, as Evenson avers, set the standards for which fiction has and is judged.
Assuming that Aristotle’s guidelines are “natural” — that he merely jotted dowen what was self-evident — is exactly why they have such a firm hold on our judgments. And it’s exactly why it is vital for light to be shed on that fallacy. Like all systems of power, they are not inherent. They are created and codified and implemented and reinforced.
The intellectual history of the twentieth century is in part a history of questioning assumptions about what is natural and what is constructed. One might even argue that what separates modern thought from traditional thought is this faculty of questioning assumptions rather than accepting them.
You can do it, Owen!
Hey Mike & Stephen, I intend to chime in to your conversation, but just wanted to say…I was lucky enough to study Finnegans Wake with S.E. Gontarski, the Beckett scholar, and he taught me a few crucial tricks for entering the Wake, the most important of which is to begin with book 4. When you get to the end of book 4, what should be the end of the book, you will be reading a long monologue by the character called ALP (Anna Livia Plurabel — the wife and mother), she is becoming the ocean as she speaks, at the final words flip to the opening of the book and continue. Those opening words, “riverrun past adam and eve,” those are both the opening remarks and the concluding remarks of ALP as she becomes the ocean…this method will give you the much needed momentum to push onward. Think of it as a way of slingshotting yourself through the text. Also, reading it out loud yields great benefits. I’ve got other tricks, but those should help you get started. It’s a fucking rad ass book — Mike, I know you’d love it if you sunk your eyes into it — Stephen, I’m not sure you’d love it but I bet you would.
Thanks, Ken!
Have you read On The Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd? I recommend!
House of Leaves was big for me, too. Terrifying in a unique way, still.
I have Taleb’s Black Swan on my “must get soon” list. Excited to see what this guy is all about.
Yes! Joseph Campbell is a great addition to this conversation, not just b/c of his connection with the Wake, but also because of his idea re: The Hero’s Journey, which seems to resonate with Aristotle’s Poetics in interesting ways. One quick example might be that first line you’ve quoted “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted…” echos Aristotle’s explanation of the difference between poetry and history and his conclusion that poetry is more powerful than history because it represent not what did happen but what could happen.
FW is incredible. I must be a freak, because I love reading it, and get angry if I get interrupted before I can get at least a ten page go. It destroys most poetry I’ve read; better music.
Hi, Alan, thanks for your response.
I think you are right to note the way in which fiction today seems less stringently aligned with either convention or experimentation. I think it’s right to think about texts in terms of their fluctuation between these and other signifying categorizations. I do, however, think you are too charitable to conceive of an equality between these two tendencies.
I wish you were right when you say “i don’t think most serious writers believe experimental lit to be subordinate” but that has not been my experience. In my experience, especially in academia, experimental literature is treated the same way that popular literature is treated: as subordinate. Conventional literature makes up the canon, not popular or experiential literature.
I intend to write about the relationship between those two tendencies (popular and experimental) in another of my future posts in this series. In fact, I am presenting a paper on that very topic at a conference this spring.
At any rate, I know what you mean when you wonder about these posts in terms of their effectiveness. I wonder about their proper application myself. I can say that i do have concrete reasons for why I think this line of inquiry is vital, and I hope to elaborate more on those reasons in future posts.
I forgot about that Boyd book…I had put it on my list a long time ago, back before it came out, but then forgot about it. Will move it up now. Thanks.
This claim for the ineluctable orientation of and, in dialectical turn, by cognition isn’t predicated on an assumption of some ‘human nature’, but is, rather, the transcendental deduction of the conditions for the possibility of cognition-as-‘cognized’. That epistemology be anthropologized? – not necessary.
That story has to be modeled after – or by – the chronologicality of cognition? But our perceptually modeled cognition is also ‘cognizant’ in discontinuous ways, of (for example) temporal discontinuity. (A “trace” that persists tracedly, and so on.)
Hey, Stephen,
I think one thing you are pointing out, which I should have done a better job delineating, is the distinction between the act of reading and the act of writing. These are both connected and separate activities. As a writer, I don’t think anybody should worry one mote whether or not their creation is experimental or conventional or whatever else it could be. I see this discussion as more productive when considered in terms of reading.
That’s not meant to contradict my earlier comments about how important I think it is for students to read and learn about Aristotle…I just mean to say that when you sit down in front of your keyboard, I don’t propose you worry about what you’re doing.
As readers, it behooves us to understand what we are dealing with. If I encounter Gaddis’s JR, for example, since you brought up Gaddis. I may approach it as a work of conventional literature because I do not know that there exists anything else besides conventional literature. I assume all literature has plot, character, setting, and theme. After five pages of JR I am frustrated and begin to believe J. Franzen when he says that Gaddis is “Mr. Difficult,” that he is “unreadable.” But if, on the other hand, I knew there was something else called experimental literature, which played by different rules, which asked different questions, that proceeded differently than conventional works, than perhaps I might not get discouraged to find that JR is a text comprised of only dialogue. Learning about experiential literature can help readers by giving them insight into another kind of literature. It can help readers enjoy works they might otherwise dislike simply because they lack the tools necessary to deal with it. Conventional literature proposes a certain set of tools, many of which do not apply to experimental lit. And vice versa.
All that to say, I think what you’ve taught me here is that it’s important for me, in the future, to distinguish between reading strategies and writing strategies.
Thanks!
Begin, not at the beginning, but rather, at a better beginning: more helpful, more useful, more disclosive, less oppressively difficult ‘to enter’.
Doesn’t this admirably practical “trick” work by virtue of some narrative consistency – perhaps even an Aristotelian consistency, or, at least, one recognizably related to the ‘heurisms for intelligibility’ sketched in The Poetics?
it does surprise me a little that that’s been your experience, but then all programs/departments are different. i think i was lucky to be in a very “liberal” department when i was getting my MA, exploring experimental lit in almost all my classes in some way.
also, i don’t see an “equality between these two tendencies” at all, but that’s my lazy writing about the idea. certainly some texts display more experimental tendencies, etc.
anyway, these posts are great. i’ve looked forward to this second one. i’d write more but the semester ended the other day and that means i’m hungover and can’t type another word.
I’ll need coffee.
[…] via What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 2} | HTMLGIANT. […]
So happy that you posted this! I had been anticipating {pt. 2} for quite a while.
Chris, can you say more about how you incorporate Ackerman?
That’s exactly what I was thinking of too, Ken. I think there’s a really vital discussion to have in terms of breaking down the dichotomy between natural and constructed (everything is natural at some point–probably we don’t have a coherent sense of what we mean by “natural,” though we lull ourselves into believing that we do). One of the things I find underdeveloped in Boyd’s book is a sense of how to talk about the so-called experimental, although his discussion of “Horton Hears a Who,” with its nonlinear image/text relationships, is a starting point. Norman Holland, psychoanalytic/reader response critic gone neuro, has a cool chapter in his latest book, Literature and the Brain, about metafiction.
Hey, Tim,
The Ackerman book is what I use to teach character. It’s all about the five senses. Getting students to think about their characters as real creatures with five senses instead of thinking about them as merely descriptions (i.e. Sally was six feet tall with salt and pepper hair, etc.) really helps them to embody their characters and write them from the inside out.
The Bachelard is used to teach setting, to get students thinking about space as something that is more than backdrop, more than decoration, something active, something living and dynamic. Like the Ackerman/character studies, this text helps them embody their settings from the inside and write outward, rather than describing the surface and leaving it at that.
I highly recommend these puppies.
Thanks, Tummler! Be on the lookout for {pt. 3}, hopefully before the new year!
Cool, man. I dig that Bachelard. I’ve thought about using the Ackerman before and you’re making me want to incorporate it. I like the idea of using books that are decidedly not fiction textbooks as your primary guides for these things. That seems bold and counterintuitive and very possibly right-on.
I think it’s interesting you’re creating a linear narrative of literary history based on causality to explain how we’ve been ensnared by the unnatural structures of Poetics.
Yes: that there is a “literary history” that can be “studied carefully”.
I agree with Chris in that there is such a thing made present to us, and (I think he means) that this ‘thing’ is disclosive of the relations of force – of “power” – that constituted and continue to constitute its construction.
Also, I think it’s fairly easy to show, by laying out references to it, that The Poetics was given or had asserted of it, not only a descriptive capacity or effect, but also a prescriptive, recipe-like leverage – or was a prescriptive ‘raw material’ – in the making of literature.
What I don’t think is that Aristotle, as different from “Aristotle”, is an enemy rather than an ally in unconcealing the processes of the historical-effectiveness of The Poetics, specifically, and the working-out of relations of force in the writing of literature and “literary history”, in general.
Chris another great post working with and thru thee ideas.
About A’s Poetics, it’s important to emphasize it arrives at the principles it does thru the analysis of existing texts/performances. I probably emphasize different aspects of Athenian tragedy/comedy if I got the assignment to work up a theory of narrative but A was looking at what the playwrights were doing.
Also I think the negative is absolutely a vital aspect of the body of works and ideas we more or less call experimental.
http://begthequestion.info/
[…] part two, I used Brian Evenson’s remarks about the suffocating influence of “Aristotelian notions that […]
I personally think the world that brought about Aristotle’s poetics engendered an old paradigm based on illusion created to manipulate. It’s still happening, but people are beginning to see through a lot of the dreamveils. And we need to see through more of them, part more of them, for the survival of our planet, if such a thing is possible.
What I call Lucid Fiction, a type of experimental literature that doesn’t require plot based on conflict and drama, which helps people see alternatives to the warlike, sympathetic nervous system dominant, adrenalin based addiction to stories.
The Bible was formed, yes, by leaving a lot out according to what Constantine said, such as all the Gnostic Gospels. Putting in what was needed to stabilize their control of the dream.
Looking at the Biblical process is a perfect example of a subject to explore in Lucid Fiction. So, I nudge people to try out this direction more in the midst of all the other wonderful types of literature, from conventional to the most out there.
Maybe the old style needed believable characters and a regular plot arc, because it was trying to make the story they told us convincing. But the more we see what reality is according to new discoveries in physics, the more the transparency of the storiness seems fitting, sometimes. And the more we learn about the trickiness of the powerful people who created the warring paradigm, the more we want to pull back the curtains.
Pulling back the curtains on the methods of the story seems revealing of what created it, and why, and what other alternatives there are.
I personally think the world that brought about Aristotle’s poetics engendered an old paradigm based on illusion created to manipulate. It’s still happening, but people are beginning to see through a lot of the dreamveils. And we need to see through more of them, part more of them, for the survival of our planet, if such a thing is possible.
What I call Lucid Fiction, a type of experimental literature that doesn’t require plot based on conflict and drama, which helps people see alternatives to the warlike, sympathetic nervous system dominant, adrenalin based addiction to stories.
The Bible was formed, yes, by leaving a lot out according to what Constantine said, such as all the Gnostic Gospels. Putting in what was needed to stabilize their control of the dream.
Looking at the Biblical process is a perfect example of a subject to explore in Lucid Fiction. So, I nudge people to try out this direction more in the midst of all the other wonderful types of literature, from conventional to the most out there.
Maybe the old style needed believable characters and a regular plot arc, because it was trying to make the story they told us convincing. But the more we see what reality is according to new discoveries in physics, the more the transparency of the storiness seems fitting, sometimes. And the more we learn about the trickiness of the powerful people who created the warring paradigm, the more we want to pull back the curtains.
Pulling back the curtains on the methods of the story seems revealing of what created it, and why, and what other alternatives there are.
Excellent. Bravo.
[…] the second essay on the question of experimental literature, Christopher wrote, “What I am proposing is that […]
Enjoying these posts, really giving me lots to think about.
[…] What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 2} | HTMLGIANT. […]