Repetition Compulsion

(This post is also available at The Reading Experience.)

It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, "postmodern," has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire "era" that is said to entail a distinctive political and philosophical orientation to knowledge and perception separating it from the "modern" assumptions that preceded it. Over the last 10 to 20 years, its application to literature has been very loose indeed, as a way of characterizing any work of fiction that breaks from convention or seems at all "experimental." In the process, the term, and more generally the concept of innovative fiction, has become less tied to the original set of writers whose work prompted the coining of the term--Coover, Barth, Barthelme, etc.-- and used more simply to separate non-realist works of fiction from mainstream "literary fiction."

This broader assimilation of the postmodern as a discernible tendency in contemporary fiction has, however, entailed, perhaps paradoxically, a diminished awareness of the specific practices and identifiable achievements of the original postmodernists and their immediate successors--a loss of historical context. Thus work by writers of otherwise conventional fiction that departs even modestly from the most conservative expectations of the form is reflexively applauded for its daring and originality, even though whatever strategy or device has prompted such praise is actually at best a modification of a an already existing approach, at times just plain derivative of a move made more persuasively by an earlier, genuinely experimental writer. The notion that unconventional approaches to form or style deserve critical respect (when done well) presently seems to be a common enough assumption in most literary commentary, but this apparently is not accompanied by a recognition of the development of such strategies through the efforts of adventurous writers of the relatively recent past.

Even when some writers are ostensibly challenging conventional forms and language more radically, beyond the enhancements of realism for which many putatively experimental devices tend to be employed, these writers themselves often simply recapitulate strategies devised by writers in the previous generation of postmodernists, or, indeed, essentially reiterate an existing form created by an earlier writer. Frequently enough we can surmise that such borrowing is to some degree a tribute to the precursor, an acknowledgment that the formal strategy invoked is a compelling substitute for conventional strategies. It is not per se an invalid approach, since arguably one of the objectives of experimental fiction might be to make available alternatives to conventional storytelling that other writers might additionally develop, but again such alert distinctions are not likely to be made in a literary-media culture that discounts historical perspective and is impatient with nuanced judgments--if more adventurous fiction manages to attract any attention at all.

Although occasionally I come across a review of a new work of adventurous fiction that draws my interest, most of the time I become aware of potentially interesting adventurous/experimental books when I am offered review copies by authors, author's agent, publicist, or publisher. This is how I came to read Ben Segal's Tunnels (published by Scism Press), a work whose experimental intentions are immediately revealed when first looking inside, where we find on each page a grid of squares (nine, in rows of 3), each containing a snippet of prose, rather than a continuous prose text. A second book by an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar, Fictions, by Ashley Honeysett, did in fact become known to me through a review, in an online journal known for its focus on independent presses. This work announces in its title that it is likely to be unconventional, but one has to read it for a while before recognizing the sort of alternative strategy it is pursuing. If it announces its "experimental" intent less obviously than Tunnels, it serves just as readily to illustrate a dilemma adventurous writers can face when attempting to escape the constraints imposed by the accepted formal conventions of literary fiction.

Segal's formal device locates his book among those works generally categorized as prose fiction but that attempt to redirect the reader's attention away from "prose" as traditionally defined and toward a more expansive conception of "text" as something that exploits the material features "book" and "printed page." This approach can be seen in such works as William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), as well as, most audaciously, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It (both 1976), but the most direct expression of the goals animating the approach can be found in Federman's essay, "Surfiction--Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction," the first entry in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, which Federman edited and published in 1975. The future of fiction, Federman maintains, will reject "the traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book" linearly and consecutively in favor of "innovations in the writing itself--in the typography and topology of [the] writing." These innovations should replace "grammatical syntax with 'paginal' syntax that grants to the reader a new "freedom" that will "give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning." 

Although this is not the only kind of innovation inwhat Federman calls "surfiction"--which covers writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Calvino, as well as American postmodernists such as Barth, Barthelme, and Sukenick--it is most conspicuous in the experiments of Federman's own early fiction (as anyone who has even dipped into Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It, their "texts" roaming the page in endless configurations and unruly fonts, knows) and is arguably the most radical of his four "propositions." The implicit appeal to visual effects in the notion of "paginal syntax" was exploited further by such successors as Steve Tomasula and Mark Danielewski (Tomasula more effectively), and various other "illuminated" novels incorporate visual elements as well. Tunnels could be said to feature a prominent visual device in its use of the grid whose divisions govern the page, although its uniform appearance on each page eventually becomes less noticeable in and of itself as a purely visual object of attention. Instead, this novel follows Federman's proposal by giving the reader a role in assembling the text, literally a "choice in the ordering of the discourse."

The novel does not offer a single narrative but rather a succession of narratives, often using the same character names but occurring at different times, although all of them have a common setting, in, or around, or associated with a complex of tunnels somewhere in the California desert. The grids thus themselves represent a metaphorical version of the tunnels, which the reader is invited to navigate according to his/her own inclination: "There is no 'correct' order of reading," we are told in a brief preface, and we are advised to approach the text in a way that "treats the space of the book as something to be explored rather than exhaustively or systematically read." The reader's discovery of the work's "topology," to again invoke Federman, finds the "space" of reading to be as meandering as the tunnels the characters inhabit, the intent being, presumably, to collapse the distinction between the "content" the novel presents and its form as thoroughly as possible, but also to assert the space of the page itself as the medium of fiction, not the organization of language into compelling prose per se.

The strategy animating Tunnels is probably closer to the method employed by Julio Cortazar in his novel Hopscotch than to the experiments in typography and illustration in Federman or Tomasula. It asserts a certain aleatoric procedure into the discursive organization of the novel, so that the reader is allowed to create a narrative structure of his/her own. For such a strategy to work, the narrative (in this case, multiple interlocking narratives) should, it would seem, have some intrinsic interest (if not necessarily the sort of interest usually attributed to traditional stories). Unfortunately the truncated narratives in Tunnels, no matter how one might order them, are not long enough to be compelling in themselves, nor are the characters given the sort of development that might make them a consistent source of the reader's concern, while the language in most of the narrative fragments distributed in the squares is predominately functional and expository, advancing the briefly  unfolding and often crisscrossing storylines without much stylistic embellishment. This leaves the governing formal mechanism and its appeal to active reading as the dominant object of the reader's attention, and the novel struggles to sustain that attention.

Eventually this narrowing of the reading experience threatens to make the novel's structural device seem too much like a gimmick rather than an attempt to adapt and extend an experimental approach to freshly conceived purposes. I believe that Segal's ambition is indeed to extend and not merely to repeat already existing strategies for challenging conventional thinking about fiction, but the realization of the strategy in Tunnels, given the length and the constricted focus of the novel does leave the reader (this reader, at least) with the impression that the "freedom" granted to order the discourse leads mostly to a repetition of a formal conceit carried out more audaciously and propounded more cogently by various predecessors. Certainly, even an effort to break convention that comes up short on originality but is clearly enough sincere is a welcome alternative to the usual run of literary fiction that settles for the currently approved practices or sacrifices aesthetic complexity in the name of "saying something." Still, if an objective of adventurous, experimental fiction is to extend the formal potential of fiction itself beyond its current confines into yet unmapped spaces of aesthetic possibility, Tunnels unfortunately doesn't quite venture that far.

Something similar could be said of Honeysett's Fictions. In this case, the writer offers a version of metafiction, literally fiction about a writer writing fiction--as it turns out, writing the book we are reading. It is tempting to regard the book also as a memoir of sorts, since the narrator does indeed seem to be the author, not a separately named "character" who is a thinly disguised version of her, but the narrative so insistently focuses on the effort to write stories that the author's identity as living person collapses into her role as writer and the distinction between life and work becomes irrelevant as well. However much we learn about the various issues in the author's life (especially the problems experienced by her sister), the emphasis is finally on the process of storytelling, understood as the struggle of one writer to produce stories that can be published and meet with the approval of readers. While most of those stories about which we are told or allowed to sample do not seem particularly experimental, the chronicle of her progress in becoming a successful writer does finally result in a book that evokes one of the most identifiable experimental strategies in American fiction of the 1960s and 70s.

But Fictions is no Lost in the Funhouse or Universal Baseball Association. The book echoes the approach modeled in such classic works of metafiction, but its ambitions are much more modest. It isn't attempting to challenge preconceptions of the required transparency of fictional narrative--but it couldn't, since that challenge was issued decades ago and has been regularly renewed in the interim--but is appropriating the gestures associated with that challenge in order to suggest the metafictional, while also endeavoring to smooth the edges of self-reflexivity as an unconventional device so it might blend into something closer to autofiction. This latter mode could actually be taken as the offspring of metafiction, but at the core of most autofiction is a mistaken assumption about the intention behind the work of such writers as Barth or Coover, or at least about the presumed message readers should take from their work.

The self-reflexivity of metafiction deliberately disrupted the inherent presumption that in approaching a work of fiction the  reader will suspend disbelief and accept the artificial reality invoked by the work for the duration of the reading experience. It made the reader aware of the artifice, as well as the implicit presence of the writer in creating it. The autofictionists for the most part seem to have interpreted this acknowledgment of the writer behind the text not as the first step in granting fiction a greater freedom in formal arrangement beyond the requirements of traditional narrative, but as a move made to focus more attention on the writer as the ultimate subject of the work. Thus autofiction's emphasis on the author's life as source of interest, often examined in great detail. While this approach often does call into question the distinction between fiction and life, it does this by playing coy with details that may indeed be untransformed autobiography but presenting them in a work still  labeled "fiction." It has become memoir for writers who would rather forego the stricter conventions of that form. 

I would still call Fictions metafiction rather than autofiction, but, while the book is not without interest and does not lack craft, the craft is applied to help forge an alternate path to realism, with just enough roaming into the discursive underbrush along the way to complicate the journey. The book reminds us occasionally of the more adventurous route once followed by its more experimental forerunners, but ultimately doesn't really want to go there. In this way, the innovations of metafiction really have become more established, available to a writer like Honeysett to achieve goals different from those that motivated the original innovators. Fictions is a lively enough account of one writer's perseverance in achieving artistic success, but its rebellion against conventional narrative is muted, evoking an avant-garde practice only as a way of being more punctilious in depicting the protagonist's concrete circumstances. Similarly, Tunnels enlists a disruptive strategy because, paradoxically, it helps to bring a kind of mimetic authenticity to the depiction of both character and setting.

As someone who tries to keep up with the the publication of new experimental fiction, I would observe that a majority of the works that appear are something like these two books, adapting existing techniques and approaches associated with postmodern or experimental fiction either for purposes that turn out to be surprisingly conventional or that simply repeat what has come before. There are certainly writers who authentically try to extend the boundaries limiting what "experimental" might mean, writers like Gabriel Blackwell, Christian TeBordo, or Evan Dara, whose formal and stylistic challenges to both conventional and pseudo-adventurous fiction are both credible and refreshing. But while these writers have their fervent admirers (me, for one), they are also writers without a high profile in mainstream literary culture. Perhaps this is the way it should be, but previous innovative writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme did arguably change literary culture, for however fleeting a time. Literary culture at present may just be impermeable to this kind of change. Literature itself may have to cling to the margins, if it survives at all.