Experimental Fiction

by Armstrong, Julie;

  Further Reading

  Burroughs, S. William (1971) The Wild Boys, New York: Grove Press.

  ——— (2008) Junky, London: Penguin Classic.

  ——— (2010) Naked Lunch, London: Fourth Estate.

  Cassady, Neal (1971) The First Third, San Francisco, CA: City Lights.

  Dilwali, Ashok (2007) Sayings from The Upanishads, New Delhi: Niyogi Books.

  Hess, Hermann (1965) Steppenwolf, London: Penguin Books.

  ——— (1998) Siddhartha, London: Picador.

  ——— (2000) The Glass Bead Game, London: Vintage.

  Huxley, Aldous (2007) Brave New World, London: Vintage Classics.

  ——— (2011) The Doors of Perception, London: Thinking Ink Media.

  Johnson, Joyce (1990) In the Night Cafe, London: Fontana.

  Kerouac, Jack (1994) Doctor Sax, London: Grove Press.

  ——— (1995) Book of Blues, London: Penguin Classics New Edition.

  ——— (2000) Dharma Bums, London: Penguin Classics New Edition.

  ——— (2001) Visions of Cody, London: Flamingo New Edition.

  ——— (2007) On The Road, London: Penguin Classics New Edition.

  Lachman, Gary Valentine (2001) Turn Off Your Mind, London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

  Lal, P. (1994) The Bhagavad Gita, New Delhi: Roli Books.

  Paramananda (2001) A Deeper Beauty, Birmingham: Windhorse Publications.

  Plant, Sadie (1999) Writing on Drugs, London: Faber & Faber.

  Rinpoche, Sogyal (1992) The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, London: Ryder.

  Trainor, Kevin (2001) Buddhism, London: Duncan Baird Publishers.

  Section Three

  When Is/Was the Postmodern Era?

  It has been argued by an authority of postmodern art and architecture, Charles Jencks, that since the mid-twentieth century, in particular the early 1960s, the term ‘postmodern’ was used in connection with literature, economics, art and religion. Since the 1970s, however, the term ‘postmodern’ was embraced by academia too. So, what is it?

  What is/was postmodernity?

  Postmodernity is a complex multi-layered concept which describes the West’s political, sociological, economic and cultural condition; it is concerned with the collapse of Soviet communism and the restructuring of capitalist society which has resulted in an increasingly post-industrial, information, service-orientated age, one where new forms of communication technology have altered the routines and relationships of everyday lives.

  The very shape of existence to which we have been accustomed since the Industrial Revolution has changed dramatically. In rich countries across the globe, the old ways of measuring time are disappearing. Instant communication breaks down even further the barriers of time and space. The advent of cultural technology, the development of computer mediation, the impact of TV and the media, and the advancement of ‘modern’ transport and communication technologies can be seen as being significant changes in communication, for example, email, voice mail and texts. Undoubtedly the boundaries of time and space have been dramatically challenged by the electronic revolution. In addition, the linear narrative of work has been eroded; more and more people work on short-term contracts, some spending much of their time in front of screens, working, socializing, shopping, indeed, living in virtual communities. So it can be seen that postmodernity illustrates a major transition in human history. A new type of society has emerged, one that is structured around consumers and consumption, as opposed to one structured around workers and production.

  Postmodernity also represents a time when there is a decline in faith, in the keystones of the Enlightenment, that is, the Grand Narratives or ideologies that control individuals and society – science, religion, history – and there is suspicion of any attempts to offer ‘truths’. Some may see this as being freed from the ‘old restrictions’, whereas others may see it as being removed from security and hurled into a melting pot of disorientating plurality. With so many ‘new truths’ at our disposal, it has led us to revise our concept of truth, so that truth is believed to be something that is considered to be constructed rather than discovered. In addition, as a result of the paradigm shift brought about by social, technological and cultural change, the once universal assumptions about what constitutes the real has also been revised. So, there now exists a much more fluid and multiple sense of reality. Postmodernity, therefore, is the result of a crisis in representation and a shift in what constitutes reality and truth.

  The essence, therefore, of postmodernity is that there is no essence. Instead, society moves through a world of signs, a world where everything has been done before, and all that remains is a cultural wreckage waiting to be re-worked and combined in new ways. Postmodernity then, the condition or time in which we find/found ourselves living, is/was ‘a great, confusing, stressful and enormously promising historical transition, and it has to do with change not so much what we believe as in how we believe’; or more importantly, it can be said to be ‘a word of looking back’ at a world that has ‘just now ceased to be’ (Ed. Walter Truitt Anderson, Fontana Postmodernism Reader: London, 1996, pp. 2–3).

  What is/was postmodernism?

  ‘The term gets everywhere, but no one can quite explain what it is’. However, ‘postmodernism’ is a term that is ‘ubiquitous and yet highly contradictory’ (Woods, Tim, Beginning Postmodernism, Manchester University Press, pp. 1–2).

  Postmodernism represents the various schools or artistic, cultural movements that have come out of the postmodern period. Through the 1980s and 1990s more people became familiar with postmodernism, either through academia or through arts, in particular literature; concrete examples of such works will be explored in this section for the benefit of readers and writers of experimental fiction. The mood of postmodernity, which challenged the Grand Narratives, has been the impetus for challenging writing practice, as will be shown, but what is postmodernism’s relationship to modernism?

  What is postmodernism’s relationship to modernism?

  In her works A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), Linda Hutcheon has argued that modernism ‘literally and physically haunts postmodernism and their interrelations should not be ignored’ (Hutcheon, 1989, p. 49). There are two schools of thought about the nature and interaction of modernism and postmodernism. The first sees ‘postmodernism as an extension and intensification of certain characteristics of modernism’ (Hutcheon, 1989, p. 50). However, the second school sees postmodern as breaking with modernism, which can best be observed through the debate between the French philosopher, sociologist and literary theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard and the German sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

  Lyotard versus Habermas

  Jean-Francois Lyotard rejects all proof or truth claims and attacks meta-narratives, the Grand Narratives or ideologies that control individuals and society. Meta-narratives, so Lyotard argues, are no longer tenable, just as there can be no moral absolutes. For Lyotard all explanations and system are narratives, as are all discourses. Religion, politics and science all produce meanings which can have no absolute truth. Lyotard argues that the criteria regulating the truth claims of knowledge derive from context-dependent ‘language games’. For example, the great world religions simply tell narratives about the world and our place within it. Religion is contested and seen as an incommensurate way of knowing, with truth forever shifting. In addition to religion, science is also contested.

  A major concern of Lyotard’s is the different procedures and effects marking scientific and narrative knowledge. In its ‘modern’ phase, Lyotard claims, science sought legitimization from either of two narrative types. They were the revolutionary tradition, the prospective unity of all knowledge associated with Hegelianism, and the narrative of human liberation associated with the Enlightenment. Neither of these ‘meta-narratives’, argues Lyotard, now has credibility. Instead, ‘postmodern’ science pursues the technical and commercial aims of optimal perform
ance, a change reinforced by new computerized technologies which make information a political quantity. Computers, then, guarantee scientific legitimization because they have shifted the emphasis from intrinsic values to performativity.

  In 1980, Jurgen Habermas entered the postmodernism debate with his essay Modernity versus Postmodernity. He disagreed with Lyotard, arguing that various postmodern theories are an attack on modernity itself. Habermas argues that ‘postmodernism is no different from modernism in certain formal respects’. Indeed, ‘Postmodernism is a knowing modernism, a self-reflexive modernism’. In other words,

  Postmodernism does what modernism does, only in a celebratory rather than repentant way. Thus, instead of lamenting the loss of the past, the fragmentation of existence and the collapse of selfhood, postmodernism embraces these characteristics as a new form of social existence and behaviour. The difference between modernism and postmodernism is therefore, best seen as a difference in mood or attitude, rather than a chronological difference, or a different set of aesthetic practices. (Woods Tim, Beginning Postmodernism, pp. 8–9)

  So, what has postmodernism got to do with fiction?

  What has postmodernism got to do with fiction?

  A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determined judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art is looking for. The arts and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 81).

  Postmodern fiction can be said to be a response to the changes and uncertainty as a result of twentieth-century questions relating to the world and an individual’s place in it; therefore, it is fiction that challenges the traditional notion of a world which is logical, coherent and ordered and portrays a world that is elusive, baffling and in a state of flux. The fiction borne out of this period, which will be explored in this section, endeavours to address the crisis in representations, including questioning the nature of language; it also investigates multiple realities, multiple selves, whilst interrogating the realist version of fixed meanings.

  Postmodern writers are not homogeneous in their work. However, amongst the multiplicity of narratives used by them, there is a common objective, that is, to challenge the psychological realism central to realist fiction.

  Postmodern fiction challenges the very idea of any meaning being fixed and stable through the use of textual gaps. Within realist fiction, there is an unproblematic relationship between the actual word and what the word evokes; this is in stark contrast to postmodern works, where there is no correspondence between the signifier and the signified. In 1916, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure claims that language is a system consisting of arbitrary signs, in which there is no direct link between the sign and the concept it evokes. However, in the twentieth century, fiction is dominated by the gap between these signifiers and what they signify or represent. In other words, the emphasis is placed on the signifier rather than the signified; this, therefore, has the effect of making postmodern fiction more interactive than realist fiction, it challenges the reader to create the work’s meaning by filling in the gaps. In Jon McGregor’s collection of short stories This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You, set mostly around the fenland landscape, what is withheld is as important to the reader as what is revealed, for it is for the reader to deduce what is withheld. In The Winter Sky, for example, there is a linear narrative on one page and on the opposite page there is what Joanna ‘wrote about the boy in her notebook’ (p. 6).

  In summer the sky is blue & lifted high

  a shimmering blue silence from which

  there is no hiding place

  (save) beneath the surface of the land. (p. 7)

  The reader is constantly left guessing and is required to fill in the gaps. In addition, the postmodern writer plays with the reader’s expectations, uses juxtaposition and subverts stereotypes, rendering the work with a sense of playfulness or ‘jouissance’ as Barthes describes, encouraging the reader to interact with, and interpret, the work. McGregor’s short story Fleeing Complexity simply reads: ‘The Fire spread quicker than the little bastard was expecting’ (p. 75).

  What are postmodern writing strategies and techniques?

  Although, on the one hand, postmodernism can be said to be elitist, exclusive and academic, on the other, it can be liberating and can inspire new writing practice, one that employs a variety of writing strategies and techniques, which will be investigated later in this section for the benefit of readers of experimental fiction, and writers wishing to experiment in order to create new works of their own.

  Postmodernism resists all notions of continuity; therefore, fiction is fragmented, dislocated, abstract and sometimes it is simply a kaleidoscope of impressions. Work, therefore, often takes the form of short, fragmented sections, which can, and often do, develop into self-contained narratives, which are often disparate in terms of content; the textual gaps between sections frequently experiment with typographical devices; for example, in his work Generation X, the Canadian-born writer Douglas Coupland uses cartoon-style illustrations and slogans to create gaps within the narrative, for example: ‘ECONOMY OF CHOICE IS RUINING CHOICE’ (p. 89).

  Fiction is playful, ironic and engages with the past; it is concerned with bricolage, assembling something new out of existing texts, that is, fairy tales, myths and folk legends. In her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, the late British writer Angela Carter rewrites fairy tales to address feminist issues. She plays with women’s roles and their sexuality by challenging the way women are portrayed; for example, The Bloody Chamber is a re-telling of Bluebeard, but instead of the heroine being rescued by a male hero, she’s rescued by her mother.

  Some postmodern work employs frequent time shifts; this is apparent in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut was born in 1922 in Indianapolis. During the Second World War he served in Europe; as a prisoner of war in Germany, he witnessed the destruction of Dresden, an experience which inspired Slaughterhouse-Five and the time-traveller, prisoner of war, protagonist, Billy Pilgrim:

  ‘Listen:

  Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

  Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times,’ he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between’. (p. 17)

  To believe Barthes, a text is simply ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (Death of the Author). Postmodern writers then are at liberty to experiment with their fiction by mixing old and new cultural forms, fact and fiction, different genres. They raid high and popular culture for signs and images, and representations of mass media and consumer commodities, which in turn are incorporated into their literary works, as Coupland writes in Generation X: ‘SEMI-DISPOSABLE SWEDISH FURNITURE’ (p. 84), ‘Japanese Minimalism’ (p. 85).

  Indeed, postmodern writers recycle narratives, enjoying the practice of intertextuality, referencing other texts, in order to generate novelty and creativity. There is emancipation in being able to poach other discourses in order to tell stories, stories which rewrite the narratives of history and science allowing the reader to see the world with fresh eyes; stories which celebrate linguistic play and invention; stories which investigate our many worlds and selves, and in so doing, writers celebrate difference, and delight in uncertainty and collapse of meaning, allowing readers to escape from the claustrophobia of fixed belief systems so that they can b
ring their own multiple meanings to the work. As a result of the old truths being broken down, writers are free to rewrite them anew.

  Postmodern fiction refuses unity; it actively engages with the moving play of signifiers rather than attempting to constrain plurality as in traditional realist fiction. Pluralism is the focus of postmodernism, and there is an underlying dismissal of the concept of a coherent self. Postmodern fiction vehemently rejects a single centre of consciousness and is replaced by a series of simultaneous, overlapping narratives which continually defer resolution. As the British writer Jeanette Winterson says in Art Objects: ‘ … I am a writer who does not use plot as an engine or foundation. What I do use are stories within stories within stories’ (p. 189). Therefore, meaning is never fixed or single; it is constantly shifting, opening up endless possibilities for the reader and writer. Complete meaning escapes; there are flickerings or scatterings of meaning; meaning is transient, incomplete, uncertain, reflecting the chaotic, messy, shifting world it reflects, and is born out of. Winterson would agree: ‘For me, the fragments of the image I seek are stellar; they beguile me as stars do, I seek to describe them, to interpret them, but I cannot possess them, they are too far away’ (p. 169). Postmodern fiction, then, is fiction sometimes composed from fragmented images; these images can often be so fragmented that the work is rendered ambiguous and difficult to read. However, ‘Readers who don’t like books that are not printed television, fast on thrills and feeling, soft on the brain, are not critising literature, they are missing it altogether’ (p. 35). Therefore, it is up to the reader to become actively engaged with the text to bring about their own meaning. As Barthes says in Death of the Author: ‘A text is made of multiple writings drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.’

  Postmodern fiction, therefore, experiments with form and language and can be seen as an attack on traditional realist works and an abandonment of the traditional linear plot. Postmodern fiction relies on mood rather than plot, indeed a ‘variety of mood and tone to make way for those intenser moments when the writer and the word are working at maximum tautness’ (Winterson, Art Objects, p. 173). There is an attitude that pervades in postmodern fiction which suggests that realist fiction has lost all credibility. The idea behind the work of a number of postmodern writers is that the conventions of realism are exhausted; it is therefore impossible to create an original literary work and themes reflect this ‘end’ of writing. So, out of this environment, a new fiction emerges: metafiction. Metafiction is preoccupied with its own construct and status, it exposes the craft of the text, drawing attention to the text’s factiousness, resulting in self-reflexive, self-conscious fiction, as Dennis Potter writes in his novel Hide and Seek: