Random
Rethinking Experimental Literature / the Avant-Garde / what Henry Miller calls “the inhuman ones”
"Pond Scum" by Bill Benzon
I love Benzon’s photos of pond scum, especially because many of them feature manmade objects amidst the polluted water, which creates an interesting tension between the living and the dead. The juxtaposition of “nature” and “industry” also appeals to me. Bio and synthetic. Both are contagions. Neither are innocuous. Alone they seem dormant, put together they seem toxic. Or at any rate, they seem removed from humanity, forgotten, neglected, afloat in their own private universe. I’m beginning to think of “the avant-garde” synonymously: both living and dead: undead. Or more precisely, not-human, inhuman, unhuman, or as a kind of desire to dehumanize.
Conversation is cracking over at Montevidayo lately on the topic of “the avant-garde.” I tried to join in by offering some preliminary ideas about the connection between the avant-garde and dehumanization. But then other obligations got the best of me and I fell out of the conversation. Then, in the comment section of an interview I did with Noah Cicero over at WWAATD, I responded to questions by Stephen Tully Dierks and tried to extend some of these ideas by showing their application via specific literary texts (Beckett, Barnes, and Burroughs).
All of this to say, I figured maybe I’d do a thinking-out-loud post here on the topic.
What I have for a long time termed “experimental literature” is perhaps, upon further consideration, best described as a form of human abstraction, an attempt at defamiliarizing the human experience or human understanding. A D Jameson has proposed that “Experimental art is that which takes unfamiliarity as its dominant—even to the point of schism.”
On one level this seems right to me, but it also seems problematic in the way it relies on “unfamiliarity.” How exactly do we calculate unfamiliarity? As artists, wouldn’t we need to have a complete comprehension of all previous works created in order to produce something unfamiliar? And from the reader’s perspective, what is familiar and unfamiliar would depend on exposure. Isn’t it more precisely the act of defamiliarizing understanding or experience that we should consider the experimental impulse? Understanding and experience, of course, directly relate to being human.
Whereas concrete literature (or) realistic or naturalistic literature (or) representational literature seeks a connection with humanity, with the human experience; experimental literature, perhaps more accurately described as abstract literature, resists connecting with humanity, resists mimesis. The desiring machine of abstract literature moves away from the clarity of realism, toward the opacity of the unknown.
Interestingly, this impulse seems to manifest in other artistic mediums as well. Consider the difference between:
“The Problems we all Live With” by Norman Rockwell (1963)
AND
"Sketch Les Indes Galantes" by Frank Stella (1962)
The Rockwell moves toward understanding and experience, toward humanity. The Stella moves away from understanding and experience, toward inhumanity. 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 with a comparison of Ashbery’s poem “These Lacustrine Cities” and Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” Through the comparison she shows how “The Wasteland” corresponds to (i.e. represents) a real London, whereas “These Lacustrine Cities” has no referent because it is imaginary and therefore is indeterminate. I’m not finished with the book yet, but even in this opening example it seems like Perloff is describing the difference between a closed text (“The Wasteland”) and an open text (“These Lacustrine Cities”). Bringing this back to my current ideas, I’d offer that “the Wasteland” is an example of a human text, an attempt at becoming more human; whereas “These Lacustrine Cities” is an example of a dehumanized text, an attempt to become less human.
If not human, than what? Monstrous? I have a lot more to say about that idea, but not now.
Again recently over at Montevidayo, in reference to this work of couture by Alexander McQueen:
Lara Glenum commented:
“What I love about antler-lady is how she is nothing but accessory, a rococo mash-up of textures & species. Her code-switching, her occluded face, everything is inhuman. Incongruity made congruous through kinesis alone. Sutures me into my terror lobes.”
Everything is inhuman.
Yes!
I could easily get carried away in this post, offer a bazillion examples and quotes, but I will resist and say this is the trajectory of my current thinking, which I’m attempting to puzzle out as a potential dissertation prospectus. I’m keeping notes here, if you’re interested.
Let me end with this passage from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), a book I am finishing now for the first time — an amazing book — a beautiful and disgusting book — a book I highly recommend:
Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity – I belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples. I can see about me all those cracked forebears of mine dancing around the bed, consoling me, egging me on, lashing me with their serpent tongues, grinning and leering at me with their skulking skulls. I am inhuman! I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and the inert slag they breed a song that contaminates. I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. (254-255)
Thought provoking, but I’m not sure I understand the ultimate purpose in trying so hard to extract “experimental” writing from “other literature.” It’s also difficult to compare “experimental” as a category to historically-loaded categories like “realism” and “naturalism.”
You write:
“Whereas concrete literature (or) realistic or naturalistic literature
(or) representational literature seeks a connection with humanity, with
the human experience; experimental
literature, perhaps more accurately
described as abstract literature, resists connecting with humanity,
resists mimesis. The desiring machine of abstract literature moves away
from the clarity of realism, toward the opacity of the unknown.”
This seems almost unfair to the best realistic and naturalistic literature, most of which does what you say experimental writing does in the end. The best realism, for instance, is not “real,” nor is it a mere attempt at mimesis.
The Rockwell painting also seems more complex and “unreal” than you claim.
When I read Dickens or the Brontes, I feel like I’m reading work that moves “toward the opacity of the unknown.” When I read Naturalism, I definitely don’t get the sense that I’m reading something that strives toward “mimesis”: “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Country of Pointed Firs,” “Red Badge of Courage”–to name just a few–all resist “clarity.” Naturalism is also too often miscasted as a simplistic, man vs. nature literature, when in fact, it’s the opposite–it’s about man’s acceptance of the unreality of a “pre-social wilderness,” and the narrative compulsion that undergirds such a tension.
Chris,
I too am interested in terms like “experimental” and “avant-garde” (and importantly their very changing meanings), but I do want to point out that most of the writing on Montevidayo is explicitly not about “experimental” or “avant-garde” literature. A lot of what we’ve been writing about has been about anachronism, kitsch, the gothic, tasteless, B-movies, genre literature, the necropastoral, not what I think of as the official high taste of “experimental” literature. Thus my fundamental disagreements with “Poetics of Indeterminacy” (it does have to be read in its context, as a reaction against the dullsville quietism that reigned at the time), and I have several posts where I explicitly criticize Perloff’s models of literature.
When I am writing about Alexander McQueen and various other gothic types (in fashion, film, poetry etc), I’m trying to think about poetry outside of the conventions experimental vs conventional model because I feel those discussions just doesn’t have anything to with what I’m writing or the stuff I like to read. I’m thinking about things I like to think about and those writers/texts seldom make sense to me inside the rules of experimental literature as set up by Perloff and others… For the record I prefer Jane Eyre to The Cantos… (But Ashbery, is he so different from Jane Eyre?).
Also, Naturalism and Realism were once the avant-gardes (look at Strindberg’s drug induced dream plays, that’s still the weirdest shit around)… As for “human,” that’s certainly a key issue – the idea of “interiority” having been one of literature’s great hallmarks, but which many people do not believe in, and that’s where I find I have agreement with some “experimental” writers (other experimental writers not at all).
I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m “correcting” you; I appreciate greatly what you’re up to, but I think my own thinking has very little to do with experimental writing. This doesn’t mean I’m opposed to people thinking and writing about it, it just means that my thinking has very little to do with it, and the writers I like tend not to be official experimental writers (though the term is ver provisional).
Johannes
Hi Christopher,
Thanks for the link. As for that definition of mine—“Experimental art is that which takes unfamiliarity as its dominant—even to the point of schism”—I think we can define “unfamiliarity” very simply. As I write in the next paragraph of that post:
“The experimental artist wants her artwork to be different from all the other artworks around her. She desires that her results be unusual, unfamiliar to the point of looking peculiar, perplexing. She may be drawing on conventions, she may be working inside one or more traditions. But her conventions and traditions are not dominant ones; they are, perhaps, older ones, or unpopular ones. Or she may be importing ideas and conventions from one medium into another, where they are not well known.”
So a complete
comprehension of all previous works, or of all current works, is not necessary. The artist is simply trying to make the artwork unfamiliar from other works around her (those she’s cognizant of).
Naturally this is a subjective distinction. (As you note, “from the reader’s perspective, what is
familiar and unfamiliar would depend on exposure.”) If I make something that’s unfamiliar to me, I would call it experimental, but if you then see it and say, “That looks just like a piece by so-and-so”—well, you’d consider it less experimental than me. I think this happens all the time, in fact.
As for your other distinction: “concrete literature (or) realistic or naturalistic literature
(or) representational literature seeks a connection with humanity, with
the human experience.” That is to say, why is non-representational art necessarily inhuman? So a Normal Rockwell is a human work, but a Mark Rothko is inhuman? I don’t see how that follows. Isn’t abstraction a part of life, and a part of the human experience?
I also don’t agree that “experimental literature, perhaps more accurately
described as abstract literature, resists connecting with humanity,
resists mimesis.” In fact, I disagree with that quite strongly. I don’t believe that experimental art has any particular method or subject matter. If everyone else around me was making abstract art, and I made representational art, that would (by my formulation) an experimental piece. You may not agree with that, but I would insist upon that distinction. Indeed, I think it’s actually very wrong for critics to think of experimental art only as being abstract, a tendency I’ve noticed in the past, and which has often puzzled me. It leads to mistakes like the one I’ve observed on the Frameworks listserv (which I’ve discussed elsewhere), where anyone scratching on film emulsion is automatically an experimental artist, regardless of how timeworn that particular “experiment” is, while anyone who makes a narrative film is automatically not experimental, no matter how unusual that narrative film may be. There are lots of experiments that can be made with representation! (Indeed, at one time, lots of what we now consider representational art was experimental.)
Cheers,
Adam
I don’t know why the formatting got screwed up in my last comment. I hope my overall point is still clear. A
I agree with MFBomb’s comments. I think there may be a distinction to be made between realism and experimental literature, as well as real and unreal modes, and that they may overlap to a degree, but they are not strictly analogous the way you have argued here.
To my mind “experimental” means trying something new, and sometimes when you are making abstract art you’re just aping what may have been experimental in the past, but has since calcified into a standard medium. Other times you are making something realistic, yet experimental. I might cite such examples at Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Infinite Jest or even The Babysitter by Robert Coover (which seems to me to tread on both sides of the line with aplomb).When William Burroughs was doing his cutups, it was experimental, but if I follow his and Gysin’s description and simply ape their technique, it doesn’t truly experimental.On the other hand, I suppose there is an argument to be made that “experimental literature” has calcified into a genre, and that that genre is necessarily abstract and inhuman. But that seems to me rather limiting.
yes. thanks, AD.
what is human? what is inhuman? what is known, what is unknown? why this division of this and that? why these two things different? why the binary? why separate them? these things are made with words, realism and experimentalism. i feel like reading this post is like reading gass and gardner, but instead of them actually meeting on points it is like reading a mind that wants to categorize in order to put experimental on some pedestal. it’s not. neither of them are. it feels like some people want experimental and real to fight. they don’t, they won’t, not really. they hold hands. look.
look, this post feels like this: human = boring dumb, inhuman = cool, worth exploring; known = boring dumb, unknown = cool, worth exploring; familiar = boring dumb, unfamiliar = cool worth exploring. it feels like that man and that feels kind of forced. the familiar is unfamiliar if you really look. the human is inhuman if you really look. the known is the unknown and on and on, but if you want to separate them that’s okay and the experimental and the representational are all tied up in each other.
Yes, “experimental literature, perhaps more accurately described as abstract literature, resists connecting with humanity, resists mimesis” is true of some ‘experiments’, but surely not of experimenting literarily as a whole or category. For example, Molloy and “Mr. Squishy” are relentless concrete, representational, and mimetic, and for many readers, each (or either) of them successfully connects with “human” emotion and intellect at least partly as functions of the experimenting they incorporate.
–but one can see – with the Magical Me of Henry Miller, for example – that resisting the claims of “humanity” – those that one is privileged to believe ‘dispensable’ – with all the rhetoric at one’s command feels terrifically, what, empowering.
I’d like to hold on to the possibility – at least for thought – of “binaries”, but keep the useful or disclosive ones and discard, as you’ve suggested, the merely privative contrasts (human/inhuman, known/unknown, familiar/unfamiliar).
For example, is the “unfamiliar” – say, the “monstrous” – to be considered exclusively as separate from the “human”??
yeah, i’m all for a good binary that generally helps clarify academic thinking, but only insofar as it is understood to be a tool, not something which is necessarily true. something which is necessarily loose, unsteady, ultimately incapable, etc.
Thanks for your response, Johannes. It helps me understand your project better, and it helps me to reconfigure my thoughts.
I am at this weird point right now where I am looking around, surveying, and trying to come up with an interesting contribution to this field. I’m trying ideas out. Seeing what fits, what doesn’t fit. That’s the whole point of the Five Questions series: I’m trying to learn what other people think about the subject, etc.
I know y’all are over there talking monster talk about necropastorals and anachronisms and kitsch and contagion. I read every post that gets posted over there, and I think about them sometimes for hours. I’ve read your books and Joyelle’s books as well as many of the other contributors’ work. I’ve also gotten hold of many of the books mentioned on there as well, from Cinematic Bodies to Daniel Tiffany’s stuff. I know you don’t identify as an experimental writer, or consider what goes on at Montevideo experimental, and so maybe I have made a huge mistake connecting that word with some of the ideas or posts generated over there.
It is interesting how that word is such a hot button. Experimental.
It’s not just you, it’s many many many writers who resist that word. It’s got a lot of power. It engenders a lot of resistance.
One of the things I can’t figure out is how it is any different to discuss “kitsch”? I mean, it’s not the case that everything is kitsch, is it? And if only somethings are kitsch, then how are you able to distinguish kitsch from something that isn’t kitsch in a way that I cannot distinguish experimental writing from something that isn’t experimental writing? Categories exist, right? Is it just that I’m thinking/writing/talking about this particular category in a way that’s unproductive or uninteresting? Because that’s what I’m trying to do with experimental literature. I’m trying to identify a difference. For some reason, it seems like some folks want to either negate the difference or else discuss a different kind of difference. I mean, discussing kitsch and B-movies requires that you distinguishes the difference between those things and say “the avant-garde” and “A-movies” — right?
This learning process has taught me that some people think the category “experimental writing” does not exist. Some want to say all writing is experimental, which is just another way of saying it doesn’t exist. I’m sort of stumped and I sort of feel like Sisyphus pushing my experimental literature boulder up the hill only to have a fleet of dissenting voices push it back down the hill. Part of me wants to say, “jeez I’m an asshole for thinking/writing/talking about this stuff, I should give it up” while another part of me says “there’ something to it, stick with it.” I don’t know.
[…] Johannes on Jul.01, 2011, under Uncategorized I had a strangely visceral reaction to Christopher Higgs’ post on HTML Giant calling Montevida… It was of course a curiously defensive reaction on my part and pretty pointless. So now I’d […]
I like what you’ve written here, MFBomb.
I think the best experimental literature does ‘connect with humanity’, if I understand what Chris is saying correctly. Or at least can connect with humanity, maybe more so than the worst ‘realism.’ I also think that even abstract literature (or art) can be mimetic of experience, a feeling, or reality, albeit a perhaps from a different point-of-view.
While admitting that all these categories are problematic, I wonder sometimes about labels – why there are only two dominant labels (categories/genres) (at least in terms of contemporary literary fiction) – experimental OR conventional (realism?). For one thing, I think experimental writing is not necessarily unconventional, meaning that there is plenty of derivative experimenting. Perhaps because we can’t define the generic constraints of experimental writing, that often experimental writing is defined in terms of what it isn’t. But there are plenty of ‘realistic’ novels that can’t easily be pigeon-holed either, so are those experimental? I think it could be argued that the novel hasn’t really hardened into a form, in say the way you could argue a mystery has, so in that sense, aren’t all ‘good’ novels experimental? If I take a look at canonized novels, I would call many of them experimental – maybe more of them than not.
I also wonder about something labeled as experimental that merely seems non-realistic, that much of what gets labeled as experimental or innovative is so because it contains elements of surrealism or the fantastic. But wouldn’t we call surrealism conventional at this point? Surrealism is surely recognizable to most people (especially in advertising and film) — even if they can’t label it as such, so how could a surreal text, written today, be labeled as an experimental text?
Also, I like this “an attempt at defamiliarizing the human experience or human understanding” – I would say, though, that maybe the best experimental literature is a re-contextualization of experience, not necessarily an attempt to defamiliarize. At least in my own writing, I’m not really trying to defamiliarize anything, but to get at something from perhaps another angle.
Some experimental vibrations going on here, announced by Josh Stanley, Brit transplant at Yale, currently, which is why you will find as many Brits in it as Yanks, and that’s OK, since poetry in the UK right now, the “experimental” kind, is all in all a good deal thicker than in US. Hot Gun! is hands down one of the hottest poetry and po-thought mags to emerge in past couple years. Including newly revealed texts here by Ed Dorn:
>Sorry to cross post —
Dear eaters,
The summer sun glows on the bean sea that separates us all from the glottic love of the distant shore and the fiery rubber eraser of hope. At last, to you, in the end I am pleased as gunk to announce the publication of the second issue of Hot Gun!, a special issue on the work of Edward Dorn. You can find it here: http://www.hotgunjournal.com/ .
This issue of Hot Gun! contains across 126 pages i) a selection of poems by Timothy Thornton, Nour Mobarak, The Rejection Group, Francesca Lisette, John Wilkinson, Alexander Nemser, Jonty Tiplady, Luke Roberts and Justin Katko; and ii) a section of work on and by Edward Dorn, including essays by Reitha Pattison, John Armstrong, Kyle Waugh and Richard Owens; two unpublished poems by Dorn, “The Poem of Dedication” and “Osawatomie”, with notes by Justin Katko; and Dorn’s introductory note to The Book of Daniel Drew as well as an uncollected poem, “To Tom Pickard & the Newcastle Brown Beer Revolutionaries”. Most of this work was collected in early 2010. It costs 10 dollars in the US and 10 pounds international (postage is included in both prices). Friends, I am, mountebankishly doing the commodity shuffle, ever
Yours, Josh
Hey Adam,
Thanks for responding.
Upon further consideration of your definition, it seems like you are attempting to define experimental art for the artist — like, if you want to make experiemtnal art then make unfamiliarity your foundation. I’m not sure how useful it is for a critic. I mean, if I’m to discuss a work of art created by someone else how am I supposed to establish that it has taken unfamiliarity as it’s dominate? Am I suppose to find it unfamiliar to me? If so, this would seem to say more about the critic than the work under investigation.
With regard to your question “why is non-representational art necessarily inhuman?” I would direct you to Ortega y Gasset’s essay called “The Dehumanization of Art” (1925). That’s where I get some of the ideas I’m beginning to work out. He specifically addresses this issue, and he specifically argues that non-rep art is a form of dehumanization. I guess I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that representational art and experimental art can be synonymous. In order for this to be true, it would seem that a difference in kind could not be established. This returns us to your definition, which is in effect an attempt at distinguishing a difference in degree rather than kind: the level of familiarity. I would argue instead that there is a difference in kind between representational and abstract art. At any rate, thank you again for responding. I always enjoy getting an opportunity to correspond with you.Warmly,Chris
“I also wonder about something labeled as experimental that merely seems
non-realistic, that much of what gets labeled as experimental or
innovative is s
o because it contains elements of surrealism or the
fantastic. But wouldn’t we call surrealism conventional at this point?
Surrealism is surely recognizable to most people (especially in
advertising and film) — even if they can’t label it as such, so how
could a surreal text, written today, be labeled as an experimental text”
______________________
I think you’re onto something–too often today, anything considered “non-realism” is labeled “experimental,” which indicates a lack of literary historical knowledge and perspective; furthermore, what’s often labeled “realism” is one specific kind of realism typically associated with the late 20th C minimalist short story (Carver, Hempel, Munro, etc.). But Victorian fiction is ridiculously “experimental,” and the Victorians actually coined the term, not the Slim Fast American Short Story Writers of the 80’s who often have the term slapped onto their work by default because their work is “simple” and “straight-forward.” Realism, though, is not a mere shorthand term to describe work that is clean and simple. I can be guilty of using the “r-word” in this way myself, and it’s a habit that I’m trying to correct because it’s simply shallow and historically-disengaged.
Too many writers writing today haven’t studied the “classics” thoroughly enough, probably because of some misguided yet pervasive notion that the only literature beneficial to their own work is the more (or most) contemporary. You even see this sort of thing casted about by literary journals–“read our issues, know what we publish,” but one has to wonder how useful such advice is to the writer in the long term–and journals themselves that should not be in the business to maintain a brand, but to publish the most original and unique voices.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. I think most of the novels I read (subjectively, ‘good’ novels) are experimental even though I’m not sure anybody would label them as such.
I wonder about the second paragraph, too–it’s difficult to read widely, because there’s SO much to read, but yeah, even though I love a lot of contemporary literature, I think it’s much more useful for me as a writer to read older stuff (“the classics”). I try to be balanced.
hi Chris, after reading this and reading my post i guess my own comment is sort of asshole-ish, so i apologize for that. i don’t think anyone thinks you’re being an asshole though – you clearly are deeply devoted and invested, which is awesome.
in any case, it may not appear this way from my earlier comment, but i do believe there is a sort of difference between “experimental” and “representational” writing. however, i think it dangerous to actually go into a definition in which they are exact opposites (familiar/unfamiliar; known/unknown; mimetic/abstract; human/inhuman) because then hierarchies necessarily emerge. rather, the definition of the terms should always include and play off one another. representational art is never necessarily dealing only with the ‘human’ or ‘known’ and that’s a problem of defining. also, experimental writing isn’t always dealing with the ‘unknown’ or ‘inhuman.’ the reason i jumped quickly onto this post about real and experimental is because it seemed, to me, both prescriptive and limiting, rather than going wider and opening up the terms. rather than opening them up, it kind felt like it was closing the door on them – here is what they do, how they both work, what they’re about; but writing and reading is never like that for me. i don’t know: these two terms have to be put into play with each other rather than sided up against each other. too often the terms feel in opposition, rather than in dialogue or play. experimental writing exists, so does representational, and all the many grades and shades of grey between exist too. i think maybe there’s an intuitive element being left out here in the categorizing/defining of these terms.
i don’t know if the experience is the same for everyone, but a thing i’ve noticed is that the experimental stuff i read now no longer seem so “experimental.” and the representational stuff i read now doesn’t seem so “real.” well, i think i’m just talking to talk, which means i should stop. be well.
I think one benefit of reading the classics deeply is that when the writer does read more contemporary stuff, he or she isn’t reading the latter in some sort of echo chamber, if that makes sense. Reading the classics only deepens a writer’s reading of contemporary literature.
For instance, imagine how one’s understanding of the 20th C and contemporary short-story cycle would be deepened by re(reading) and studying “The Canterbury Tales.”
No I just posted a post on Montevidayo apologizing for being too quick in my response. As I noted in my survey answers I have ambiguous feelings about “experimentalism”. But it’s very much worth investigating, I think it’s a key term obviously. I think I would like to see a geneology of the term – to see how it has been used and when. I think it’s a pretty recent term.
Johannes
There’s nothing “asshole-ish” about questioning either/or (“+/-“) phrasing, nor is anybody pushing any “experimental” questioning “down” – just testing it for (old-fashioned?) effects like discursive consistency and adequacy in application to actual literature.
For me, and in reply also to what you’ve said below, useful dichotomies are not just “academic”; in their unstable persistence, they’re also reflective of everyday diversities in experience. (For example, coaches talk comfortably of “conventional” tactics and strategy as opposed to “experimenting” with approaches that would expose the weaknesses – the falsities – of “conventional” thinking.)
One way of thinking of the mixture of “convention” and “experiment” – and of the error of missing their co-determination and even cross-pollination – is to think of them as poles as opposed to mutual exclusions. In other words, some particular text, Molloy, say, might be quite “conventional” along some plane of intersection (like standard sentence structure and description of object, perception, and emotion) and challengingly “experimental” along another plane (like frustrating expectations of a smooth arc of event to message-laden climax).
The category “experiment” certainly doesn’t need to be prescriptive, regardless of how evaluatively it and its other(s) are described.
The difference in kind between “representation” and “abstraction” is no argument that one – or both – couldn’t co-exist with “experiment” or “convention”.
A piece that represents (conventionally) even as it experiments – even to the point of undermining the convention of “representation” itself–is that unimaginable?
The character Marcel “represents” a person and, in the context of ‘his’ description of his sensations and sensibilities, a milieu not less for the great strangeness of Proust’s sentabyrinths – constructions that have caused readers to wonder, ‘is there such a thing a mind distinct from its world?’
The difference in kind between “representation” and “abstraction” is no argument that one – or both – couldn’t co-exist with “experiment” or “convention”.
A piece that represents (conventionally) even as it experiments – even to the point of undermining the convention of “representation” itself–is that unimaginable?
The character Marcel “represents” a person and, in the context of ‘his’ description of his sensations and sensibilities, a milieu not less for the great strangeness of Proust’s sentabyrinths – constructions that have caused readers to wonder, ‘is there such a thing a mind distinct from its world?’
In the matter of the “experimental” or “avant-garde” vis a vis the “representational” or the “human,” there is the important case of Fernando Pessoa, an experimental poet of the first power who wrote (usually) in very representational, referential, even conservative registers and forms. It’s just that this fairly conventional poetry and criticism was written by ninety-some (the ones that have so-far been identified, that is–there are four main ones) of his heteronyms: full-blown author-characters, with their own life stories, literary histories, individual styles, ideological allegiances, personality quirks, and the like, and many of whom interacted with one another through epistolary, critical, or manifesto-type exchange, group/movement affinity, and so on. Pessoa was the central figure of the Portuguese avant-garde in the early 20th century, founder and editor of its most important journal, Orpheu.
A case like Pessoa (and there are many others–there’s a whole shadow tradition, going far back, of writing that messes with the “natural” laws of paratext) proves that the discussion of what is experimental or kitsch or avant-garde in literature can’t be relegated, as it almost always is, to style or form on the page proper. In fact, history shows that the gears of institutional absorption run fast when that is the horizon, because there is little resistance… And such easy digestion and classification of even the most seemingly resistant or extreme attitudes are very much at the heart of the history of the avant-garde, obviously.
You want one freaky pastoralist who is stranger than any necro one you can come up with? Read Alberto Caeiro, Pessoa’s central heteronym.
“It is interesting how that word is such a hot button. Experimental.
It’s
not just you, it’s many many many writers who resist that word. It’s
got a lot of power. It engenders a lot of resistance”
_______________________
I think writers resist the word because it’s difficult to contextualize. You used “Realism” and “Naturalism” in your OP–these are not mere descriptive categories, and there is no “Experimental” period in, say, British and American Literature that you can direct us to, at least one that compares in cultural scale to: 19th C British Realism, 19th C American Realism, American Naturalism, and Trans-Atlantic Modernism; thus, you’re comparing “Experimental” to categories that represent established and well-documented historical categories in Western Literature.
Compounding this problem is the fact that all of the aforementioned historical categories were heavily influenced by writing many would consider experimental.
my biggest obstacle in following the thinking in this article is the word inhuman. with such synonyms as these:
cruel, harsh, inhumane, brutal, callous, sadistic, severe, savage, vicious, barbaric; monstrous, heinous, egregious; merciless, ruthless, pitiless, remorseless, cold-blooded, heartless, hard-hearted, dastardly; unkind, inconsiderate, unfeeling, uncaring; informal beastly
& secondarily these:
superhuman, unearthly, extraordinary, phenomenal, exceptional, incredible, unbelievable
one has to admit that whatever one deems inhuman is inextricable from the human (only human beings (not lions) are inhuman / human beings create whatever we might call inhuman ) or else we are referring to something beyond human understanding but that is nonetheless inextricable from nature & so inextricable from us
there is a wonderful song by the lower dens that addresses this titled: what isn’t nature?
& what isn’t?
funny / i like the photograph for how human it is / how tender i mean in its gaze
Lagsolo,
For your consideration:
Lyotard
Zizek
Zima
Ortega y Gassat
Bruns
Just as a starting point.
so many words for so few ideas
classifiers gonna classify [via unexperimental living and class privilege]
Your posts inspire me to rethink on the topics, and I feel fresh with your new ideas. Just keep up the good work, and continue to write such wonderful articles.
word. i think the world needs more privileged kids to live on the wrong side of town to discover the true meaning of class privilege. or maybe they should use their intellect to do good instead of perusing narcissistic and ambiguous notions of art to help validate their own private dysfunctions. or maybe they could do both.
Hi, Alan,
Thank you for your response. I woke up thinking about this stuff, and in particular about what you say when you say:
This has given me much to think about. I appreciate your candor. It forces me to think harder about what I’m proposing. And it tells me I need to go back to the drawing board with these ideas.
what you’re referring to would require coming to conclusions, but the approach here is luxurious academic theorizing and never really closing the loop, for everything is a grey area and there are no real answers (except for what happens on the wrong side of town, that requires very definitive responses and approaches) just enjoy it, it’s free and usually educational, better than tv
agreed. i felt my ‘tone’ may have been a bit overly abrasive, perhaps. in any case, i like this: “dichotomies are not just “academic”; in their unstable persistence,
they’re also reflective of everyday diversities in experience.” i would push further than dichotomies being reflective; they are, in my experience, “constructive,” in that they shape the way we (whoever) experience because too often they are “true,” accepted as “true” or “real” and “unfailingly stable” – this isn’t a problem if one sees it and can hold onto it but most, in daily life, like too much the this or that game not as game but as reality.
and yes, poles, exactly.
the problem with the usage of the word inhuman here (less so dehumanizing or nonhuman) isn’t just that it’s harboring a false dichotomy but that it coils itself pejoratively around the works of art you bring up before it can illustrate some reason for doing so or illuminate some common ground among them / establish neutral parameters for grouping certain kinds of works together@font-face {
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but despite this word & other contentious terminology in this piece (as already addressed by ad / alanrossi / johannes which i won’t repeat) i do think i understand the impetus behind your investigation / get the gist of yr concerns / some of which if i probably share
at any rate i’m really interested in what yr getting at
thx for yr suggestions / wallace stevens’ essays on reality & the imagination might come in handy on yr end
sorry for the weird stuff in there
One could do worse than read only the ancient Greeks (with maybe Horace and Livy thrown in for good measure).
In an interview with Dalkey Archive Press, Queneau argued that every Western novel could be seen as either the Odyssey or the Iliad: “one can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of
the “Iliad” or of the “Odyssey.” I had the pleasure of hearing this idea
of the Occidental novel as a continuation of the Iliad summarized
recently by Butor during a conference [25 July 1961]. He said excellent
things in this regard, but he didn’t speak about the Odyssey, and it
seems to me that the Odyssey represents the other pole of Western
literature.”
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100621780&extrasfile=A09F7FC7-B0D0-B086-B6E449D151A0A60B.html
i appreciate reading your thoughts on these topics, Chris. i liked “tropic of cancer” a lot.
Henry Miller: “Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.”
yeah, dude. i know what goes on here: literary nascar; cheap entertainment for people with jobs that don’t allow full-throttle theorizing/writing; most spectate but a few are bold enough start doing laps. but it’s fun to watch sometimes! you know, i’ve always wondered why humans evolved the ability to do calculus, but (obviously) have never been able to figure it out. all those neurons firing away, enlarging consciousness, developing a schema for physical reality…
i’m glad the comment was potentially helpful. your posts and thoughts are always of interest to me; thanks for sharing.
Spoken like a Walmart realist.
Familiar/unfamiliar can be viewed as a binary, but I mean that more as a spectrum. It might help that I’m leaning heavily here on Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending (which I mention in my original post, which Christopher links to).
All artworks are conventional, to some degree—otherwise, they wouldn’t make any sense to us. Language and art are shared, social experiences that depend on people following rules to some extent or another. When you go to a museum, you know which pieces are the artworks, because you have some expectations about what art is.
Some artists are very happy to abide by established conventions. They make work that plays by the rules, and doesn’t challenge the audience’s expectations. (This doesn’t necessarily mean the work is realist or representational or mimetic or anything. If you’re living in a time and place where everyone is making, say, surrealist work, and you make conventionally surrealist work, you’re not an experimental artist.)
But sometimes you go into a museum, or a gallery, or you pick up a novel, or you’re just out on the street, and you see something that challenges your assumptions of what an artwork can be. To pick an easy example, John Cage sends David Tudor up on stage and instructs him (with a score) to not play any notes on the piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In 1952, that shocked a lot of people, and deeply challenged a lot of sensibilities as to what a work of music could be.
Note that 4’33” still followed a lot of conventions. Tudor went up on a stage at a festival, sat down at a piano, followed a score. That score used conventional musical language: it had three movements, and those movements each read “Tacit” (a familiar musical term). But the end result was something very surprising—something very unfamiliar to the audience in attendance, and to others when they heard about the piece.
Today, 4’33” is pretty well known to anyone who studies 20th C. music, and to many other people as well. It’s lost some of its surprise. It’s become more familiar. If I went to a music academy and got up on stage and performed it, I probably wouldn’t surprise anyone—they would recognize what I was doing. I wouldn’t be making an experimental artwork.
For me, an experimental artist deeply values that unfamiliar sensation—that feeling of “What the hell is going on here?”—and therefore makes works that seek to create it. The work may still abide by various conventions, but it seeks to challenge its audiences expectations of what is possible in that kind of artwork. And this can be to a large or small degree. (An artwork can be “very experimental” or “somewhat experimental,” or anything in between.)
Making experimental art is not synonymous with making good art.
It is not synonymous with making non-realist or non-representational art.
All art is human if it is made by humans. Art is a human activity.
When I first saw abstract art, I didn’t like it, felt as though the artist was trying to pull a fast one. Then I learned more about it, got more used to it, learned to like it. Now I feel very comfortable around it. Sometimes a Mark Rothko or a Yves Klein painting feels warmer and more emotional to me than a random 12th Century French religious painting. Although I could learn more about that art, too, form a deeper connection with it.
Incidentally, and in case anyone’s interested, I wrote something a while back about the 20th Century’s movement away from, and then back to, the figure (representation); it’s here:
http://bigother.com/2010/03/06/the-dominant-ctd/
Cheers,
Adam
don’t misunderstand, to be fair and objective, I like reading these posts, I do think they are or can be important and there are some obviously over-brilliant people here, but the feeling of trying to stand on water and speculation does get to a point where I’m looking for some WalMart realism, which is kind of an oxymoron, perhaps and experimental idea, it’s always about what is real
Yes, constructive, generative, reproductive. One would want, without making a counter-claim about ‘truth’ or reality unawares, to hold on to the disclosiveness of a dichotomy without dogmatically insisting on it being an expression of ultimate reality.
– for the distinction (between, say, “familiar” and “unfamiliar” or “human” and “inhuman”) to enable discovery rather than to cement imposition.
As Adam just said, below, the difference between “convention” and “experiment” is itself such a polarity, a “spectrum”. We’d want to realize – as we do ordinarily in everyday experience – that “experiments” are always performed in a (somewhat) known context and “conventions” are always unexpectedly and unexpectably unstable.
i love that poem
yeah here stevens uses the word inhuman in its second sense / superhuman, unearthly, extraordinary, phenomenal, exceptional, incredible, unbelievable
my issue with its use in this piece is that it feels ill-suited to the distinctions chris seems to be trying to make
& it’s not the only instance of fuzzy word-choice that’s hindering the development of thought in this piece / oddly enough it’s the abstraction in this article that’s getting in the way of a clear discussion about abstraction, which i totally believe is possible
thanks for the nugget c:
pizza yr generalizations are kinda unchill / i mean i’m currently unemployed, broke, have lived on the wrong sides of various towns for years, sometimes can’t afford to buy food, have very little stability in my life because i did choose full-throttle way back when
& maybe i’m not the only one
i get yr frustrations but there’s no need to add to the funeral pyre of human unreasonableness, right?
literary nascar is over (if you want it)
walmart realism is over (if you want it)
let’s play fair / that’s what this is all about
i’m so glad you posted these lines! so relevant to chris’s piece & to the entire discussion / thx!
tinyurl.com/3umps6f
Chris,
I’m very interested in your project.
I like that whenever you bring up the subject, you don’t just settle on one term – it’s always a cluster – unhuman, non-human, inhuman, dehumanizing. I think it captures nicely the current open-endedness of your project and the various strains that it pulls from and may also work against simple dichotomizing. On that note, I wonder about the connection between the inhuman as originally brought up by Apollinaire and later theorized by Lyotard and the more recent concept of the posthuman and the work by Hayles, Haraway, and others.
In your post, other terms creep in: realism, abstraction, experimental art. Others have made good comments on this, so I’ll be brief. With abstraction, I do think the move away from figurative art was a huge part of the inhuman tendencies of the early avant-gardes. On the other hand, there’s plenty of art you could call inhuman that works with figuration, albeit deformed, collagist figuration. The McQueen costume is a good example. And there’s figuration that’s all about surfaces, with no interiority (Pop Art is an example) – Johannes mentioned something about that.
I think the concept-cluster of the in/un/non/de/post-human is really useful precisely because it doesn’t neatly line up – cannot be easily explained – with terms like abstraction or experimental art.
Mimesis is another problematic term. Aristotle uses it quite differently from Derrida, for example.
Of course when we talk about dehumanizing art, we still talk about art produced and consumed by humans. Of course. That doesn’t discredit the concept one bit.
Defamiliarization – it’s a Shklovsky term (ostranenie). Elsewhere I suggested that inhuman art decenters the human. I wonder what the difference might be.
i support elusive communities of folks coming together to shoot the literary shit. like the neuron, humans need dendritic, reticulated nets of human sympathy/empathy to sustain civil society. and we all make mistakes, which is why i live where i live. my beef is with the constant posturing (when at it’s worst) that engenders an idea of art as something to soothe all of life’s misfortunes. walmart realism — is this different form k-mart realism? — does this — not the posturing, the soothing. but the meta-ness of these discussions, i.e. experimental art, just makes me recoil with disgust. i’m obviously not the target audience, nor am i being very clear, but i find it all decadent, and not in a good way.
artists use lies to reveal truth, no? i suppose i’m just, like, write the shit you’re gonna write and forget about lifting the curtain to show me your fancy theoretical scaffolding.
thanks josef
yr comment is really helpful in understanding why these multiple terms / why inhuman
hi pizza
i do understand your irritation & am often annoyed for the same reasons / & that’s probably why i’m so interested (maybe others too) in this particular post because it seems as tho it could be headed toward clearing the atmosphere of hot air
btw i think that it’s really important that you wrote “recoil in disgust” given the nature (god every word is freaking out on me / sorry) of all that’s being discussed here
The world materially entwined with “human” being, the necessary condition for the possibility of “human” – but yet not-humanly indifferent: ‘nature’. The “sea” is audible, rhythmic, sometimes even melodious–is it singing? in words?
A fine Stevensian word to indicate what is or is imagined in human speech to be not-human is beyond.
I think “rage for order” and “rage to order” are heteronyms for “to discover” and “to impose”, “conventional” and “experimental” are (largely) descriptors of technique and intended effect, and “the grotesque” is one of reason’s necessarily failed attempts to ken what is or is imagined to be beyond ‘reason’.
Yes, “spectrum”. – though, while not committing oneself to purely “familiar” and purely “unfamiliar”, one might still ask ‘how is the fracture between “familiar” and strange disclosed or exploited or constructed by this experience, this art?’
The emphasis at places in the blogicle/on the thread on novelty is striking: to put it simply but, I hope, accurately, if the work is “new”, the artist is experimenting (in whatever is “new” about it), and if the work is “new” to the audience, it is experimental for that audience.
This doesn’t seem to allow for much experimentation with the “familiar”. It also posits an unrealistically static audience, a reader, say, who is the ‘same’ during a second or nth reading.
Oidipous Turannos is persistently an “experiment” in you – not that you identify in a vulgar way with any of its particulars, but rather that you encounter its words and become strange–to yourself.
WalMart realism is no more “real” than a staged and scripted “reality show.” It has the illusion of rebellion but the fulfillment of the status quo. The words still get in the way. It’s no less fancy, but just lazier.
the atmosphere will never be clear, of course. it’s only when you stop running laps (or when you’re engine gives out) that you begin to feel comfortable where you are.
Hi deadgod,
> This doesn’t seem to allow for much experimentation with
the “familiar”.
Doing unfamiliar things with familiar materials counts as experimentation in my book. Experimentation is anything that defamiliarizes, then.
> It also posits an unrealistically static audience, a
reader, say, who is the ‘same’
> during a second or nth reading.
Of course there must be a subjective component. When I first saw Fellini’s 8 1/2, it made very little sense to me. Today it’s so familiar that I can’t understand how I once failed to understand it. Many critics have accounted for this phenomenon: in cinema, for instance, see David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Cognitive Approach, for one. And in regards to the larger culture, Theodor Adorno accounts for this phenomenon very well. Many experimental artworks lose their experimental cache over time: Beethoven, once a radically innovative and confrontational artist, is now used to sell cars. Dali has become the Bizarro Norman Rockwell, as Nabokov predicted he would. The culture is always on the move.
Cheers,
Adam
Hi Chris,
> Upon further
consideration of your definition, it seems like you
> are attempting to
define experimental art for the artist — like,
> if you want to make
experiemtnal art then make unfamiliarity
> your foundation. I’m not sure
how useful it is for a critic. I
> mean, if I’m to discuss a work of art
created by someone else
> how am I supposed to establish that it has taken
unfamiliarity
> as it’s dominate? Am I suppose to find it unfamiliar to
me?
> If so, this would seem to say more about the critic than the
> work
under investigation.
Doesn’t all criticism? The critic and the artist always experience different artworks. For instance, if you were to read my first novel, Giant Slugs, I’m sure you’d have a very different reaction to it than I, the author, do. How could it be otherwise? What’s more, different critics will have different reactions to the same artwork—see our different reactions to Inception and Scott Pilgrim. I don’t think this is a problem with my formulation. Criticism isn’t about trying to get everyone on the page; it’s about reacting thoughtfully to artworks, which necessarily involves examining one’s own experiences and biases.
In any case, the situation you describe happens all the time. When I watched Memento, I thought, “Ho-hum, what a mediocre derivative work.” To some other audiences and critics, it’s the most experimental film they’ve ever seen. Everything must be taken in context.
Meanwhile, critics eventually come to some consensuses. If a majority of critics decide that Memento is an experimental work, then there you go. I’ll just write a dissenting opinion. That dissent would probably be good for the culture at large. Why should people agree about things?
I’m pretty familiar with Ortega y Gasset’s writing. I don’t think his thinking necessarily holds up. I’m sympathetic to certain aspects of his project; his defense of Modernist art, at the time, was a valuable one (and influenced work I admire a lot, like William H. Gass’s defense of the morality of art—that moral art is that which is true to its own artistic nature).
But other aspects of his writing are, I think, suspect. For one thing, Modernist art is not necessarily so strange to us now. The Rite of Spring, which caused such a stir at the time, is practically quaint now. And it’s easy to hear the folk influence on it, now; it’s not just some mess of notes, as many heard it back then.
Which leads to another concern: I don’t agree that Modernism was such a radical break with Romanticism as so many have argued. For example, in retrospect, many Romantic elements carried over into Modernism: the emphasis on folk art and regionalism are visible in the Modernist novels of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner. Modernism was not one stable movement with a central ideology or aesthetic. Even while critics like Adolf Loos and Mies van der Rohe were arguing against ornamentation, for instance, you had the Art Nouveau and the Gothic Revival, etc. It’s a mistake for critics to flatten the whole time period into one set of strategies and values. And one can find numerous examples of this. Gertrude Stein took some of her ideas and wrote The Making of Americans. Hemingway took many of those same ideas and wrote The Sun Also Rises. And they were good friends!
Along these lines, it’s easy to overstate the degree to which abstraction was a defining aspect of Modernist art. And it’s easy to overstate to what extent abstraction is a defining aspect of experimentation. That is the mistake I think you are making.
> I guess I
fundamentally disagree with your assertion
> that representational art and
experimental art can
> be synonymous. In order for this to be true, it
would
> seem that a difference in kind could not be established.
> This
returns us to your definition, which is in effect an
> attempt at
distinguishing a difference in degree rather
> than kind: the level of
familiarity. I would argue instead
> that there is a difference in kind
between representational
> and abstract art.
I don’t think I fully understand this, but I’ll try to reply.
To me, yes, representation is a matter of degree. An art work can be more or less representational. And that quality has nothing to do with how experimental a work is, not absolutely. I’m sure the people who first employed Renaissance perspective made works that looked pretty weird to those around them. They were experimenting with perspective, mimesis. More recently, David Hockney has experimented a great deal with representation in art (experiments that were taken up and developed by the YBA movement). When he and other Pop Artists started working, the culture was pretty familiar with Abstract Expressionism. It seems silly to me to posit that Pop Art couldn’t be experimental just because it moved painting away from abstraction and back toward representation. Was Lichtenstein not an experimental painter? Was he more or less experimental than Helen Frankenthaler? (To argue either side there strikes me as a nonsensical argument, akin to one of Wittgenstein’s language games.)
Furthermore, to argue that “there is a difference in kind between representational and abstract art” seems to me to create a needless binary. How would that binary account for a painter like, say, Gerhard Richter? Or novels like Janet Frame’s State of Siege, or Ann Quin’s Tripticks, which derive much of their power from alternating between abstract passages and pretty straightforward representational passages? I could name dozens and dozens of other examples—hundreds, even, if not thousands.
Cheers,
Adam
I largely agree with this; it seems a more succinct version of what I’ve been saying. Cheers, A
hi Chris,
I’m not sure about the idea that experimental literature doesn’t connect to humanity. If you look at some of the writers you have interviewed in your five questions series- particularly Dennis Cooper for one- their works connect to the humanity of the reader. Perhaps even more so on a deeper emotional level then other writing.
I think trying to categorise ‘experiemental’ literature as having some set rules kinda goes against the idea of experiemental. Everything probably was experiemental at some stage and then just become used by more.
tinyurl.com/3umps6f
WalMart realism, or, it might be worthwhile to consider any realism, is situational and created by the receptor participants, so, a range of colliding and merging representations might be applied without bias or preference. The authorial voice and style used throughout a text (abstract or representational) is still a single individual presentation and filter with bias and taste and in worse cases an agenda or point to make. I would be interested in seeing use of multiple, disconnected, even arbitrary but recognizable presentation layouts that share only a climate or environment and where the author has disappeared as a stylist or commanding voice as this seems to be playing the god scenario.
I wonder if Chris is more or less working out his own aesthetic? Nothing wrong with that–it’s just difficult for writers and artists to apply the necessary distance from such matters when in the throes of working out their personal aesthetics.
Its seems to me that many of Chris’s concerns–at least in the manner they are often expressed–are his own. It’s easier to follow “set rules” when you you’ve already filtered those rules through your own process; it’s not so easy (or helpful) to speak of those personal rules as absolutes for everyone else who isn’t you.
I have not read Perlof’s book but have seen other reviewers reference it at length. It has been much on my mind as I work on a “reivew” of There Is No Year intended for the “Last Book I Loved” section of The Rumpus and my own blog (ToulouseStreet.net). I think if you are going to differentiate between realism and experimental literature some of the second-hand ideas I have encountered (really need to read Perlof) make sense. Experimental literature frequently requires the active reader to decode the text. This is the exact opposite of inhuman, in Miller’s or any other sense that comes to mind. It is simply humanistic in a different way for different ends. There Is No Year, if looked as as a critique of suburban, consumerist society doesn’t differ that markedly in intent from Dickens or Shoplifting from American Apparel, but it does differ radically in form and function. Experimental literature without the possibility of exegesis is like experimental music without a guiding form: noodling.
Thanks for this contribution to the conversation, Kent. Pessoa is one of those figures who I’ve read in bits and pieces, but don’t really know much about. I look forward to conversing with you about this topic of “heteronyms” for what will hopefully be a fruitful future post here at htmlgiant.
Hi Josef,
Thank you for your kind response.
The posthuman is certainly a node in the nexus of what I’m interested in pursuing. Questioning liberal humanism, becoming animal, becoming machines, cyborgs, phantoms, specters, hauntings, the undead, monsters…all of this inhuman/unhuman/prehuman/dishuman/nonhuman stuff interests me.
I think my biggest problem is trying to link it to “the avant-garde” or “experimental”. I’m considering abandoning this link. One minute it seems worthwhile, the next it seems untenable. I just don’t know.
I did take your recommendation re: Apollinaire and I picked up his book on the cubist painters today at the library It seems like this is where he’s discussing the inhuman — yeah? — if there are other places, I’d be super keen to learn of them!
Thanks, Stephen. You keep me on my toes!
Thanks for this comment, MFBomb. It helps me to see someone put it this way: in terms of these posts being an attempt to define a personal aesthetic rather than an attempt to be prescriptive. I think I’ve done a sub par job differentiating between those two actions. I can do better. I’m gonna try!
Yes, that’s right. That’s where Apollinaire brings up the term, and to my knowledge that’s the only time. It’s certainly the first time.
Following our conversation over at Montevidayo, I’m inclined to think that the terms “inhuman” and “avant-garde” overlap a great deal. But then, that’s my view of the avant-garde (it’s inhuman impulse sets it apart from high modernism). As I (we) found out, the term has a lot of baggage, and I also am considering dropping the term in my critical work and focusing on other, perhaps more specific aspects that bring certain artworks together – like the inhuman. It’s obviously still a useful term to name what’s known as the historical avant-garde and its legacy.
As for “experimental,” I’m curious to see what you come up with. One thing to keep in mind is that even realism can be experimental or avant-garde (Brecht?). It really depends on how you define realism, and there are numerous different definitions out there. To add to the confusion, I think there’s a difference between the realist technique and realism as a genre.