Limitations in Experimental Fiction

[xidrep]

Some of you will be aware of the 'feral art' ( :) ) project that DeeCrowSeer and I have been tootling around with just lately (see 'writers'). Not completely original, I expect, but original to us...The question leading from this is: 'What are the limitations to experimental fiction?' How far can the written artform be warped and altered before it becomes so distilled out of language as to be incomprehensible and meaningless to the reader/ viewer? And have we already explored the major combinations (the main textual forms, I mean, not middle-ranking military thermal underwear)?

Discuss.

(And for those of you interested in this subject, you may want to take a snitch at my 'Experimentalists' post in the 'Writers' section)

Experimentalists and Adventurers! Call For Submissions!
[broken link]

[Dead-Air]

Interesting question, but really it comes down to a matter of taste. I've read plenty of critics who find absolutely no merit in Gertrude Stein's writing and yet she turned the literary world on it's ear and made much of 20th Century writing possible. I love The Naked Lunch by Burroughs, but I don't really think there's anything wrong with somebody who can't make it through it.

I would venture that it is actually impossible to write complete gibberish even with an effort to do so, there will always be some logic or syntax even with made up words. Actually two: one put in by the writer whether he or she tries or not, and another by the reader sorting things out.

Or in other words, woook skittz raphnoger rrrrrr gazpo.

[Whiskers]

Or in other words, woook skittz raphnoger rrrrrr gazpo.

I want my MTV?

[A_Non_Ymous]

Or in other words, woook skittz raphnoger rrrrrr gazpo.

I want my MTV?

Or perhaps an attempt to summon Great Cthulhu?

LSN

[Michael Moorcock]

I'm late back here. Experiment is a response to need. If you find the conventional forms (some of which began as experimental, of course) still useful for what you want to do, then there's no need to experiment.
The experiments in NW were largely a result of frustration with the conventional forms -- especially modernism -- which we felt failed to describe our experience. Burroughs wasn't so much an influence as an inspiration. We saw what could be done -- including what could be done with sf tropes. Experiment, as I've said elsewhere, is like revolution -- it goes backwards and forwards at the same time. I was looking back to Victorian and Edwardian pre-modernism (or perhaps early modernism) as well as looking forward, if you like, to the 21st century -- call it post-modernism. These days, maybe because I've established my own techniques, I actually enjoy the great modernists like Pound, Eliot, Woolf and others. But I still don't feel much resonance with my own experience. A whole mixture of reasons -- time, place, class being most likely the main three.

[xidrep]

It's interesting to note the parallels in technique of experimentation between fiction and music in the past 110 years or so. This is more Dead-Air's field, but the almost-synchronous use of cut-up and odd juxtaposition in the two art forms is possibly an indication of the reciprocal influence that they have on each other*.


*'Hello? BBC Radio 4 Recruitment? Yes, I understand Jenny Murray's off sick...' :lol:

[Michael Moorcock]

Yeah -- all art approaches the condition of music... :D

[Doc]

Or the Condition of Muzak? :)

[xidrep]

Or the cognition of muskrats?

Soz, convergence of several threads in my frontal lobes for a second, there!

[Michael Moorcock]

Maybe I'm easily impressed at the moment or am spending too long in the outhouse or have been in Mississippi too long but here's another quote that struck me as interestingly questionable in the LRB for 2nd December 04, this time from Daniel Soar reviewing The Double by Jose Saramago, an interesting writer of, if you like, postmodernist fables.
'Fiction depends on chracter, and writers of fiction commonly assert character by investing an invented person with distinguishing traits. In genre fiction, telling characteristics often boil down to physical marks: a fierce mouth, a mole on the cheek, a limp. In fiction that defines itself as literarary (as idiosyncratic, as extra-generic), a character becomes characterful by being assertively distinguished. Verisimilitude declares that people aren't simple, tht they are contingent complexes of contradictory characteristics and impulses: cruel mouths and other melodramatic synecdochal leitmotifs are ruled out; if there's a moral argument, cruelty has to exist in combintion with kindness, and one has to do battle with the other to win. writerly ambition decides that a character must be unique, or particular and incomparable: to admit influence or (worse) stereotype is to deny your power of invention. And storytelling demands that your character must resonate unforgettably. The trouble is that if you want to make your invention indelible, you need to have faith in archetype, to believe that there are certain kinds of chracter who will linger, who will represent somethying larger than themselves. The question is: should they be particular s well as general ? The answer is that it probably doesn't matter, so long as you have drama and grandeur and the vagaries of personality. In this scenario, great fictional characters become so many Heathcliffes, Morton Denshers, Emma Woodhouses and Raskolnikovs.'
Hmmm ? Does this make D'Artagnan, Aramis, Athos and Porthos literature ? Long John Silver ? Sherlock Holmes ? Does this suggest that such definitions were never useful ?

[Dead-Air]

It's interesting to note the parallels in technique of experimentation between fiction and music in the past 110 years or so. This is more Dead-Air's field, but the almost-synchronous use of cut-up and odd juxtaposition in the two art forms is possibly an indication of the reciprocal influence that they have on each other*.


*'Hello? BBC Radio 4 Recruitment? Yes, I understand Jenny Murray's off sick...' :lol:

Well, I claim no monopoly on any field that my parachute may have happened to land me in, but you have kind of nailed my artistic tendencies. I got heavily into experimental music from performing poetry of that sort live and feeling it needed further sound augmentation. This put me in a "singer in a band" role for a bit, but when the chicks didn't start rolling in (at least not nearly at the rate they did for djing stupid '80s hits in a night club) I started getting more into what can be expressed by manipulating sound without words at the forefront, or with someone's other than mine (such as Chuck Swaim my frequent poet co-conspirtator.)

I've always been fascinated with words about music and music about words (pictures too, but that's another story) and drawn to the work of artists who can do something with both. Moorcock is an obvious example in prose, but Phillip K. Dick is another. Even if a writer doesn't do music with their words like MM, I tend to at least prefer the ones who's bios say they are fanatic listeners.

And your point about "experimental" literature having a lot in common with music seems spot on to me Perdix. Which leads me to believe there aren't really that many limitations, so long as somebody likes it.

[Michael Moorcock]

Might be worth noting here that New Worlds in the 60s was referring to Schoenberg, Ives and others more than to Joyce and Woolf. We were very keen on twelve tone music (at the editorial end, anyway). We argued that music was always the most advanced art (as indeed did that bloke who first said all art aspired to the condition of music... and told us to burn with a hard, gem-like flame...). My own inspiration for structure always derived more from music than any other form -- Mozart for more classical structures, Ives for things like Mother London. I'm sure structure can be imagined in a number of ways, but music was the best for me and still is. One thing I like about Dylan's Chronicle Vol. 1 is his description of his current structuring methods!

[Dead-Air]

One thing I like about Dylan's Chronicle Vol. 1 is his description of his current structuring methods!

There's another guy who know's a thing or two about weaving a tapestry with the two artforms as yarn!

Interesting to hear about your Ives connection. Are you a Harry Partch fan as well?

[Michael Moorcock]

I'm a bit conservative in that area, I must admit. I know Eno was a fan. But I'm not that familiar with Harry Partsch and ought to give him more time, I know. I absolutely hate John Cage, for instance, and almost flung myself onto the stage to wrap my fingers round his throat the last time I went to see him perform. I'm idiosyncratic, though. I feel the same about Bach. And Michael Jackson. Sheer rage. I'll weep at a Schoenberg performance, for instance and shudder with pleasure while listening to Messiaen. Or Bob Dylan, for that matter.

[Dead-Air]

Yeah, hard to say from that range of artists and reactions whether Partch would be your cup of tea or not. He's nothing like Cage on any level though, so you might or might not like him. Sounds like you'd be apt to hit an extreme one way or another. :D