Experimental Literature

[hello. New here. Name is Remy. Wanted to share something]


I find it hard to believe you don't know the beauty that you are, but if you don't, let me be your eyes.
I still remember that day, dusty feet and sweat streaked hair. Bent, mud-painted over your steaming engine; hands over pipes and my hair pulled behind my head with a shoelace. I could hear your profanity from inside the diner, two miles down the road, where my brother made modern art with the Sweet & Low packets.
“Look,” I said, while you stood prostrated, hands gripping the doorframe, “Here’s the problem. It’s simple.” And you let me guide your fingers over the humming metal. ( Read more...Collapse )

© Lacunavox 2009

Jean Ricardou was a "member" (the writers grouped under this heading never considered themselves as part of a "movement") of the nouveau roman. This is his only work to be translated into English as yet. It was first published in 1969.



Anyone familiar with the nouveau roman will recognise a number of tropes used by Ricardou. Repetition, "cinematic" collage. Peculiar turns of phrase, whole sentences, entire paragraphs (apparently) appear a number of times. One sentence ends and we "cut" to another, this time about something else. But if at first the reader feels as if she could be reading a work by Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon, the various strands that Ricardou is playing with weave together to form something singular (as it is polymorphous) in an increasingly thrilling way.

I've always had contempt for idea that a work can be "spoiled" by plot details being revealed before it is consumed. But now I find myself loath to describe the clever games Ricardou plays with narrative, metaphor and structure in case the surprise and enjoyment I felt while reading this book is lessened with prior knowledge.
Perhaps one way to describe Place Names is to call it a hall of mirrors. But that would only be accurate if a hall of mirrors was intricately designed to explore symmetry, the relationship of structuralism to humanism, metaphor, post-modernist reference to authorship, realism, allegory, the place of the novel regarding the above, and the place of literature and language in general regarding the above.

This book is about "something" (an enigmatic artist, the topology of an area of the countryside, a young couple uncovering a mystery, sado-masochistic sex) and about "nothing" (the structure of language and literature, material representation versus abstraction). One reads it with the thrill of adventure found in some rubbish like the Da Vinci Code (a book and film I never bothered to consume) and the thrill of uncovering hidden structures.

I mentioned Robbe-Grillet and Simon above, along with the use of repetition in the nouveau roman. There is a certain amount of repetition used as a structural metaphor for sex in Place Names that one finds in works by those authors. But the similarities between Ricardou and other members of the nouveau roman are not as strong as those between him and another French writer, Georges Perec. Like Perec, he uses a Carrollian grid for the form of his novel and is concerned with numbers. Like Perec and Carroll, his work has to be read both as inventive formalism and as materialist narrative. We are never encouraged to believe that the characters in the works of these authors actually exist (even though Alice Liddell was a real person). They are always ciphers moving through a theoretical world, like playing pieces on a chess board. Nevertheless, the theoretical world is, like in chess, described in the style of material representation. David Alan Fowler calls Ricardou a "materio-formalist". This description I think provides a useful entry point to the work of Ricardou and enables me to avoid "ruining" it for the reader by detailing the plot/structure twists.

Furthur:
The later work of Jean Ricardou [pdf]
Author site at Dalkey Archive

Niagara
Michel Butor

Despite my obsession with the French Nouveau Roman "collective," I had never, until this week, read any Michel Butor. I had read about Mobile in Richard Kostelanetz' Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes and it sounded enticing, but I knew I wasn't in the mood for something that was undoubtably not meant for straight-through reading. I shoved the name to the back of my head and would occasionally look for copies of his books whenever I was haunting a used book store. Earlier this week, while wandering around my university library, I found myself (not surprisingly) in the French literature section. But, much to my surprise, I found myself staring at a shelf dedicated to the works of Butor.

I flipped through a couple looking for copies in English, intentionally avoiding Mobile (I still plan on reading Mobile eventually, but I generally avoid starting with the most "well known" works of an author, becuase they end up never being my favorite works by said author). I picked up Niagara and was immediately taken in by the oddly structural form (my library's copy has no dust jacket, so nowhere did I see the label "a stereophonic novel"). I took it up and started reading it, and to be frank, was sort of blown away.

Plot wise, the narrative depicts a number of dialogues of various individuals and couples who visit Niagara falls, old couples who had visited 30 years before, newly-weds, "negro gardeners," a vile seducer and his easy prey, widows, widowers, and my favorite characters; a gaudy old madam and her young gigolo. The narrative is shown through a combination of the characters dialogue, whether to someone else to to themself, an "announcer" who fills in facts about the falls and occasionally offers commentary on the action the characters are taking, a "reader" that depicts texts from an informational brochure (I'm assuming--this is unclear) that occasionally repeats itself, and sound effects, described at various volumes.

The text weaves all over the page, coming out of either the "left channel," the "right channel," or the "center," in order to simulate the listening of an audio recording. It seems a bit overwhelming within the first few chapters, but as reading continues it achieves a very peculiar, but rewarding, effect. At times I found myself wondering what an audio recording of the book would actually sound like, but then I realized that part of the point (of so much going on) is that it's a formal experiment to determine how text can reproduce stereophonic sensibilities.

Beneath all of this formal styling, there's actually a great story. While Alain Robbe-Grillet, and most of the Nouveau Roman in general, was averse to a depiction of psychological insight (it's bourgeois), Butor allows his characters, through dialogue, to reveal a heightened sentiment, and it's very affecting. My personal favorite chapter was January, where the widows and widowers stand in the icy snow and are met with the uncanny ghosts of their dead loved ones (not in reality, of course). It's very haunting, and the sense of atmosphere, mise-en-scene, and character comes together in a particularly apt way.

Some other formal elements worth mentioning include the fact that the book is divided into 12 chapters which are representative of each month of the year. The characters change in each chapter, but by name only. Abel and Betty becomes Arthur and Bertha becomes Andrew and Bettina and so on, yet the two remain "just-marrieds" throughout.

Tony Duvert

Died Aug 23, 2008
Thoré-la-Rochelle, France

Here is a memorial site to Tony Duvert that members may find interesting:
 

"Tony left a mark on his time by the extreme freedom that he demonstrated in both his writings and his life. Please share your thoughts at the loss of a brilliant writer."

 

Phallos
Samuel R. Delany

Delany's Phallos is experimental in a less blatant way than the books I've discovered before now in here. It's experimentation still comes via form, but it's a bizarrely familiar form: the core of the novel, except for a brief, two paragraph "introduction" (that serves to put the book into a specific context) is delivered as an "online synopsis" of a long out of print book of gay erotica, Phallos, written by an unknown author. The introduction posits the history of the novel: some claim it to have been written in the 17th century, while others (drawing attention to certain vocabulary and textual choices within the book) assume it was written in the 1960s (of course, it was actually written in the 00s by Delany). The absence of an absolute position of the apocryphal novel within the context of a linear literary line echoes ideas that the author of the internet synopsis (Randy Pedarson of Moscow, Idaho) points us to in the text that sits at the center of the book itself.

In comparison to the amount of "synopsis" offered in Delany's 97 brief pages, there is not much commentary offered by the apocryphal internet author, and as I've already mentioned, most of the book details Phallos' depiction of the (sexual) adventures of Neoptolomus, and his search for a possibly apocryphal religious relic called the Phallos (okay, I'm starting to realize that a description of Delany's novel is actually far more labyrinthine than the novel itself, which never approaches being confusing-- it's a pretty direct read actually). Delany's experiments with an abandonment of authorship and relocation of a text (book to internet synopsis to Delany's book) is what makes it interesting-- though possibly not more interesting than the book that Delany offers hints of throughout his novel; the epic, apocryphal, anonymous Phallos. But this is part of the pull; Delany offers, via Pedarson's "website," a quote from Umberto Eco that sets the novel in motion:

"Yet there is nothing more fascinating than secret wisdom: One is sure that it exists, but one does not know what it is. In the imagination, therefore, it shines as something unutterably profound."

--Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language

Of course, this quote applies both to the apocryphal novel that Delany describes, as well as the artifact (called the Phallos) that the characters within the apocryphal novel are desperately searching for: neither exist, but both play with the individuals perception of something unknown to draw in the reader/individual further, to instill an inherent desire. And it is desire the forms the core of Delany's book; wisely echoed textually by the abundance of gay sex scenes throughout the apocryphal novel, with Pedarson quoting many of Neoptolomus' musings/dialogs on desire.

I've never read any of Delany's sci-fi (which he is ostensibly most well known for), but I really enjoyed reading this work, and will undoubtedly check out some mo>re.

Perfumed Head
by Steve Beard

The easiest way to begin talking about this short novel would be by quoting the synopsis from amazon.co.uk (which I think comes from the publisher):

"Perfumed Head" began its life as a chapter of 'Digital Leatherette', a novel that was published on the internet; in that context the chapter formed the solution to a murder story. Recognising that, without the digital context of 'Digital Leatherette', he had written a pastiche of a conventional detective novel, Steve Beard decided to sacrifice his text to two computer programs. The first program scrambled sentences to form 'machine poetry', the second created hybrid letterforms. The final draft of "Perfumed Head" contains elements of all three versions. This intoxicating, disturbing and sometimes unreadable prose propels writing/reading to its limits. Steve Beard has, through his use of writing manipulated by computer technology, produced a book that questions the relevance of the printed page in the digital age and that pushes forward the concerns of 'chemical fiction'.

In a way the book can be viewed as an artist book; as in several places the scrambled, distorted letterforms serve no purpose other than as visual markings, almost something out of the Lettrist movement. On the other hand, sometimes the scrambled sentences take on an amazing prosody. As a comparison, i'd like to bring up what is (I guess) referenced as "IDM." Particulary, Richard Devine, and even more particularly, the song Anthracite T. Vari off of Schematic's compilation "Lily of the Valley." The song is 13 minutes long and begins as simple processed clicks and noises, eventually amassing a sort of aural chaos. However, within the last two or three minutes of the song, a melody enters and slowly there is a crossover from pure anarchic (but rhythmic) noises to a combination of melody and noise, to straight melody. The text often works the same way, the scrambled words building a chaotic rhythm that is eventually shattered with coherent prose shines through. It makes the fragments that are readable & straight forward attain a sense of emphasis and beauty.

As far as the plot goes, I obviously couldn't discern what the whole this was about (and haven't read the "chapter in Digital Leatherette" version), but it's some sort of futuristic world where something bad has happened, or is going to happen, and a man is looking for something, possibly a woman, possibly a book that a woman has, and he has an avatar, that might be sort of a robot, but other times might be him himself, named Amodeus, and well, I don't really know. Simulacrum becomes VR (which is also a character name, I think: VR), and this is the "real world" (no original copy). It's interested, but certainly not a book that you read exclusively for narrative.

It's really fascinating to me, how rhythmic prosody, plus a sort of Lettrist use of Hypergraphy, plus some actually beautiful prose, wrapped up within the genre of science fiction, adds up to a whole. The longer one spends reading, the most pleasureable the book becomes to read.

I've quoted some of my favorite selections:

"I continued to listen. Suddenly thiescenzied andescend bursts of bursts of bursts of noise frend bursts of noise mix like mix like frenzied bursts of noise of bursts of bursts of bursts of noise the descending birds." (pg 33)

"I used to feel like a prince. Like one of those colonial explorers carried through the impassable trails of the Amazon by a sure-footed Indian bearer. Telepathic communication. That was the fantasy. Tockpilegrams to his sent from my eyes sent from his to his to his sent from my eyes to his sent om appetites." (pg 47)

My other favorite passage had some of the hybrid letter forms, so I couldn't type it out, but took a picture:

(pg 44)

I can't quite figure out exactly what target audience the book belongs to. It's too obscure and, well, frankly, experimental for traditional sci-fi fans, but I suppose it fits quite nicely into the vein of experimental sci-fi initially launched via Burroughs and the Sci-Fi New-Wave (Delany, Moorcock, etc.) in the 70s. It's far more a formal experiment, but for somebody like me, I enjoyed both the act of reading it, the act of thinking about what I was reading, and looking at the book as a material object.

For A New Novel
Essays on Fiction
by Alain Robbe-Grillet

A couple of weekends ago I finally got around to reading Robbe-Grillet's sole book of criticism, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed. While I'll be the first to admit that some of the essays contained within pale in comparison to others, overall it's a very worthwhile collection, particularly if one needs help articulating why experimental fiction is far more progressive (and not necessarily in the "grand narrative" sense) than (for want of a better word) "normal" fiction. I've decided to share a few excerpts from various essays that I found particularly potent.

"The same is true of the world around us. We had thought to control it by assigning it a meaning, and the entire art of the novel, in particular, seemed dedicated to this enterprise. But this was merely an illusory simplification; and far from becoming clearer and closer because of it, the world has only, little by little, lost all its life. Since it is chiefly in its presence that the world's reality resides, our task is now to create a literature which takes that presence into account."

from "A Future for the Novel"

"How much we've heard about the "character"! Moreover, I fear we haven't heard the last. Fifty years of disease, the death notice signed many times over by the most serious essayists, yet nothing has yet managed to knock it off the pedestal on which the nineteenth century had placed it. It is a mummy now, but one still enthroned with the same--phony--majesty, among the values revered by traditional criticism. In fact, that is how this criticism recognizes the "true" novelist: "he creates characters"...

In order to justify the cogency of this point of view, the customary reasoning is employed: Balzac has given us Père Goriot, Dostoevski has created the Karamazovs, hence writing novels can no onger be anything but that: adding some modern figures to the portrait gallery constituted by our literary history.

A character--everyone knows what the word means. It is not a banal he, anonymous and transparent, the simple subject of the action expressed by the verb. A character must be given a proper name, two if possible: a surname and a given name. He must have parents, a heredity. He must have a profession. If he has possessions as well, so much the better. Finally, he must possess a "character," a face which reflects it, a past which has molded that face and that character. His character dictates his actions, makes him react to each event in a determined fashion. His character permits the reader to judge him, to love him, to hate him. It is thanks to his character that he will one day bequeath his name to a human type, which was waiting, it would seem, for the consecration of this baptism.

For the character must be unique and at the same time must rise to the level of a category. He must have enough individuality to remain irreplaceable, and enough generality to become universal. One may, for variety's sake, to give oneself some impression of freedom, choose a hero who seems to transgress one of these rules: a foundling, a vagrant, a madman, a man whose uncertain character harbors here and there some small surprise... One must not exagerate, however, in this direction: that is the road to perdition, which leads straight to the modern novel.

None of the great contemporary works, in fact, corresponds on this point to the norms of criticism. How many readers recall the narrator's name in Nausea or in The Stranger? Are these human types? Would it not be, on the contrary, the worst absurdity to regard these books as character studies? And does the Journey to the End of the Night describe a character? Does anyone suppose, moreover, that it is an accident these three novels are written in the first person? Beckett changes his hero's names and shape in the course of the same narrative. Faulkner purposely gives the same name to two different persons. As for the K of The Castle, he is content with an initial, he possesses nothing, has no family, no face; he is probably not even a land surveyor at all.

The examples can be mulitplied. As a matter of fact, the creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe. The novel of characters belongs entirely to the past, it described a period: that which marked the apogee of the individual.

Perhaps this is not an advance, but it is evident that the present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The world's destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men, of certain families. The world itself is no longer our private property, hereditary and convertible into cash, a prey which it is not so much a matter of knowing as of conquering. To have a name was doubtless very important in the days of Balzac's bourgeoisie. A character was important--all the more important for being the weapon in a hand-tohand struggle, the hope of a success, the exercise of a domination. It was something to have a face in a universe where personality represented both the means and the end of all exploration.

Our world, today, is less sure of itself, more modest perhaps, since it has renounced the omnipotence of the person, but more ambitious too, since it looks beyond. The exclusive cult of the "human" has given way to a larger consciousness, one that is less anthropocentric. The novel seems to stagger, having lost what was once its best prop, the hero. If it does not manage to right itself, it is because its life was linked to that of a society now past. If it does manage, on the contrary, a new course lies open to it, with the promise of new discoveries."

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The Helmet of Horror
by Victor Pelevin

Spent a couple of hours today reading Victor Pelevin's 2006 novel, The Helmet of Horror. It's ostensibly a "re-telling" of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (aside from being a personal favorite, it seems to pop up "often" in experimental lit; c.f. House of Leaves and Borges to some extent), except that idea is simply a launching point for a pretty fun read that uses a narrative structure to play with ideas found throughout contemporary philosophy and literary theory. It's fairly heavy on the Hegel, Baudrillard, and I guess presumably Eastern mysticism (though I'm not personally familiar, I'm going off his wiki page, and it makes sense), but not in a done-to-death way. Some of the Pynchon-esque naming of things (particularly in the topography of the helmet of horror, for example, "Tarkovksy's mirror" sort of made me groan) is a bit much, but it made me wonder if I were as familiar with Pyncho's never-ending references I would groan in a similar manner.

The novel takes the form of dialogues between several "people" in what is ostensibly a chatroom. In terms of the physicallity of the text, there is nothing outside of the chat room, though occasionally "characters" will describe "events" that occur in the "real" world (okay, I'll admit that the abundance of quotation marks here is obnoxious, but being the utterly post-modernist work that it is, is this that surprising?). One thing I found problematic was a sort of divide between engaging in dialogue in a general "bookish" manner contrasting with the few times Pelevin allows his protagonists to devote themselves to netspeak (though obviously nobody wants a slightly less than 300 page novel of that exclusively). It just seems like he didn't go all out with his chosen structure.

I'm insterested to read more of Pelevin's work, because it struck me that he handles topics that could easily deteriorate in to totally empty hipster crap with a degree of seriousness, something I can more than appreciate. Apparently it's part of a series of "recreations" of myths that includes authors I'm far less excited about such as Donna Tart and Jeanette Winterson.

Imagining Language: An Anthology, ed. by Jed Rasula & Steve McCaffery

I was just going through my Amazon Wish List to do some organizing and found somebody selling a paperback copy of this for only $20. I quickly ordered it, as the cheapest I've ever seen the paperback copy before, used, was $120 (which the remaining copies are still that high), and the cheapest I've ever seen the hardcover version was $75. Anybody encountered this massive tome before? I'm quite looking forward to it.

I have a copy of Tom Phillips' A Humument, a page of which is on the cover, and have enjoyed what I've read so far, though I haven't finished the whole thing for rather random reasons.

Strange Landscape (originally published in France as Paysage de Fantasie)
by Tony Duvert

Just finished Duvert's terribly out of print novel Strange Landscape. The story more or less covers a group (or many groups) of pre-adolescent children and their lives at what alternates between a pedophilic/hebephilic bordello and an orphanage/boarding house located in a decadent chateau. The children (and other children from the surrounding town) are the primary characters in the novel (any adult figures rarely pop up for more than a sentence or two), and the action is mostly dedicated to pre-adolescent & adolescent agression, demonstrated by either violence, sex, or sexual violence. But what makes the novel experimental isn't so much the subject matter, but rather Duvert's decision to eschew the use of punctuation and, to some extent (excluding the pronoun "I") capitalization.

At times the narrative, in it's "formless" construction (recalling, to some extent, the narrative of Guyotat's Eden Eden Eden), reads like high modernist stream of consciousness. However, it is not the psychological internal that Duvert is concerned with (written in 1976, Duvert was obviously well versed in Robbe-Grillet and co.'s nouveau roman & it's resistance to psychological depictions), but rather, it's a materialist stream of concious, constantly switching both tense and voice, characters going in and out of focus, chronology forgotten in favor of what could no doubtedly be described as a sort of contained "all-overness."

There are no main characters driving the narrative (though children named Claude, Lulu, Simon, and Yann are humanized to a largest extent [which isn't that large of an extent]), rather Duvert depicts seemingly EVERYTHING that happens to the children (different children) all at least tangentially in relation to the chateau. Which, I suppose, posits the chateau as the main character of the novel. It is not hyper present, but it is a loci to structure all of the narrative's events around.

Duvert's "all-overness" (and yeah, I'm ostensibly stealing from Clement Greenberg here, but I would argue that my misappropriation is more pertinent) is a fascinating experiment, and the sexual violence assures a level of spectacle that often shoves the form out of the foreground. The core idea in the book seems to be that the physicality of human nature and desire itself will often overreach any sort of desire for a traditional "love" available between two people, regardless of gender or age. A fascinating read overall.



Further links on Tony Duvert:
Tony Duvert Day Part 1 on Dennis Cooper's Blog
Tony Duvert Day Part 2 on Cooper's Blog (feature excerpts from the less experimental, forthcoming [in translation] novels Diary of an Innocent and L'Isle Atlantique)
Tony Duvert on the Semiotext(e) (who recently published his non-fiction essays, Good Sex Illustrated) website