Experimental Fiction

by Armstrong, Julie;

  ‘What was it you wanted?’ he asked.

  ‘Poison … ’

  ‘Yes, for the rats’.

  ‘No, for my husband’. (p. 55)

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Rewrite Narratives

  Take the narrative of Cinderella and put it into a contemporary context. Subvert Cinderella’s traditional gender role: she is not passive nor is she a domestic slave, but she does have a life full of conflict; what is the conflict? How does she escape from it? Who helps her? Write the story.

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  In the 1990s, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was published to great acclaim; this fiction was later made into a film. Fight Club addresses issues of gender identity; it explores the crisis in masculinity brought about by ‘A generation of men raised by women’ and the impact of consumer culture on masculinity. In addition, it serves to warn the reader of consumerism and to be mindful of constructions of gender that are prevalent in the media.

  The narrator represents the American man who has been feminized and disempowered as a result of living in a consumer society. As Tyler says, ‘We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping’. Through his relationship with Tyler Durden, and the creation of fight clubs, hosting bare-knuckle matches, the narrator seeks to reclaim his masculine identity. If postmodern society produces fragmented identities, violence appears in this novel as a means by which the fragmented self can experience pain, and therefore feeling which in turn makes the men masculine and truly alive. They can also reclaim their bodies, inscribing them with cuts and bruises, symbols of masculinity, their violent histories.

  What makes this novel postmodern is the reality it creates inside itself, the way it questions reality, and produces two identities, two characters, two points of view, existing side by side, who in fact are the same character, Tyler and the narrator. This plays with the reader’s perceptions and expectations in a dislocating and subtle manner.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Play with a Reader’s Perceptions

  Create two characters who are actually the same character. Begin by writing: This is how I met Chuck Brown, I asked if Chuck was … (continue writing … )

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  And so it can be seen that there has been a cultural shift towards a different kind of masculinity and femininity. In some ways, this has to do with different visions, views and pleasures, but also with a cynicism that refuses to take the world too seriously and feels ironic towards previous generations. Consequently, there are a number of postmodern writers who are exploring and experimenting with new representations of gender, sexuality and the body within their fiction, and they are doing this in numerous ways, by employing a variety of postmodern techniques and strategies, for example, rewriting existing old texts, by subverting patriarchal views of gender, employing intertextuality and multiple discourses, and utilizing cut-up techniques.

  The Fictiveness of Fiction

  This chapter investigates how consumer culture, the media, rapid technological growth and the Information Age have influenced postmodern writers; their writing techniques will also be explored so that readers and writers of experimental fiction can use these techniques in their own writing.

  What is the impact of consumer culture on postmodern fiction?

  Consumer culture is one that encourages consumers to purchase services and goods in ever-increasing amounts, and without doubt, some postmodern fiction sets out to capture what it means to live through this experience. This is most apparent in the work of a group of young East Coast Americans writing during the 1980s and 1990s, writers referred to as the literary Brat Pack: Jay Mclnerney, Tama Janowitz and, perhaps most well known, Brett Easton Ellis.

  What form, content, themes and writing strategies do postmodern writers employ to reflect consumer society?

  The fiction of the Brat Pack is usually set in New York or Los Angeles and is saturated with references to TV programmes, song titles, designer labels, brand names of expensive cars, alcohol, drugs and references to the corporate world. The lifestyle of the characters is reduced to endless choice, fad, style, play, convenience and consumption, a lifestyle that reflects a superficial, ‘all surface no depth’, postmodern existence. Ellis writes in American Psycho: ‘I’m wearing a wing-collar jacquard waistcoat by Kilgour, French & Stanbury from Barney’s, a silk bow tie from Saks, patent-leather slip-ons by Baker-Benjes, antique diamond studs from Kentshire Galleries and a gray wool silk-lined coat with drop sleeves and a button-down collar by Luciano Soprani’ (p. 121). By employing these cultural signifiers, there emerges the world of the 1980s yuppie youth culture living in a consumer society, which is dehumanizing and spiritually depleting, a society where there is a sense of hopelessness and homelessness.

  Themes of violence and pornography render the fiction controversial. However, these themes serve to illustrate the gluttony of commercialism where everything, including people, sex and the body, are commodities, addictively consumed to no avail, because all that the consuming creates is further desires and wants.

  In Ellis’ books, the characters are not necessarily distinguished from each other by the way they speak, behave and interact, which is the means by which traditional characters are differentiated; instead, they are set apart by their choice of designer clothes, and drug and alcohol preferences. And women, particularly, are viewed as empty, glamorous objects to be consumed, or they too are seen to be consuming extravagantly.

  Ellis’ fiction is often written in what can arguably be described as a dazed prose style, that is, the use of a dispassionate and disconnected voice to recount the narrative. This voice resonates aptly with the shallow consumer culture it represents. In Less Than Zero, the young, rich Clay describes his hedonistic experiences of drugs, violence and sex in an emotionless, stream of consciousness, present-tense voice, conveying that Clay is just a passive receptor for the action that goes on around him. The book reads less like a novel, more like an unconventional form of autobiography. Indeed, the lives of the characters, and that of the author, are inextricably linked. The atmosphere, then, is one of alienation and dislocation, despair and horror. In Less Than Zero, people are ‘being mad by living in the city. Images of parents were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children’ (end of book). In addition, anything and everyone can be abandoned, replaced or eradicated as easily as one can take a pill.

  American Psycho’s first chapter ‘April Fools’ opens with ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’; this is ‘scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank … and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view’ (p. 1). The graphic violence to follow seems to echo the tone set by this opening. And whereas in traditional realist fiction an explanation is often given to account for the actions of the killer, this is not the case in American Psycho; the reader never really understands the motivations behind the crimes of the protagonist, Patrick Bateman.

  There are numerous postmodern writing strategies the Brat Pack generation experiments with, for example, metafiction devices, those of disrupting the text, playing and manipulating genres by disrupting their codes and conventions. And, although the form of Ellis’ work is often traditional, in terms of form and techniques, the structure of Less Than Zero is interesting. Whilst criticizing MTV culture as passive, Ellis uses its structure to frame the narrative.

  In his 1991 novel Generation X, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland investigates a generation of people in their twenties who have come of age in a technological, materialistic, bureaucratic society, one of Watergate, yuppies, recession, TV, divorce and crack; as a consequence, they are alienated, emotionally scarred and loathe to become an advertiser’s target market, so they quit their dreary careers to move away from civilization, to the California desert. They have nowhere to direct their anger and their disturbing inner worlds.

  There are numerous postmodern st
rategies that Coupland uses in Generation X to illustrate his satire of consumer culture; for example, as the narratives progress, they are interrupted by slogans, images, cartoons, much in the same way that advertising for consumer products frequently disrupts individuals’ lives. However, these interruptions comment satirically and wittily on the consumer world inhabited by the characters: ‘Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days’ (p. 25). These fragmentations are mini narratives in their own right. ‘Veal-fattening Pen: Small, cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles by the cattle industry’ (p. 24). In addition, the narratives are littered with cultural signifiers, from high and popular art, for example, Dali clock and Bob Hope, which take the reader into other narratives. There are references to drugs, destruction of crops, keratosis lesions, liposuction fat and microwaved pizzas, which comment further on the negative force of consumer society, although, unlike Ellis, Coupland is playful and uses humour; he also has an affection for his characters.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Create a Satirical Text Which Experiments with Disruption and Fragmentation

  Create three disillusioned characters and three narratives in which the characters relate experiences from their lives, but use humour and disrupt the text with slogans and cartoons which address issues of eighties postmodern life. Choose from some of the following to use as slogans, mini narratives or comments, as Coupland does: I am not a consumer, Don’t spend my inheritance, MTV sucks. A valium a day is the way.

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  What is the impact of rapid technological growth and the information age on postmodern fiction?

  As the writer William Gibson says: ‘Much of history has been, often to an unrecognized degree, technologically driven … Technology has driven change’ (Distrust That Particular Flavour, p. 61). This technological change has impacted on writers so hugely that new forms of fiction emerge and become present in the literary canon, in particular a new science fiction, otherwise known as cyberpunk.

  When did cyberpunk emerge?

  It emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, when writers such as William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Douglas Coupland, Jeff Noon and Harlan Ellison emerged as cyberpunk writers. Yet, the forerunner of this genre is Philip K. Dick, an American author of 44 novels and 100 short stories. Born in 1928, he began writing exclusively in the science fiction genre, around the time of the Second World War. The fiction of Dick anticipates the media-shaped world of simulation associated with postmodernity. Consequently, his writing has been highly influential in shaping and forming those writers who came after him.

  Dick’s fiction explores sociological, political and metaphysical themes in worlds controlled by authoritarian corporations and governments. He addresses issues such as paranoia and drug abuse, issues that reflect his experiences in life. In addition, his fiction experiments with time, madness, multiple realities and parallel universes. He illustrates in his work how susceptible to change reality can be and this, therefore, has implications for the concept of history. His most well-known novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in a post-apocalyptic near future, 2021, in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place affected by radioactive dust following World War Terminus. The plot revolves around the protagonist Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter, whose task is to ‘retire’ six escaped Nexus-6 androids, whilst John Isidore, who has been changed by the radiation, a ‘chickenhead’, aids the fugitive androids. The work deals with profound philosophical questions: What is real? What is delusion? Fundamentally, the novel explores what it means to be human and what qualities separate humans from androids who have no sense of empathy. In addition, it addresses human feelings of love and isolation. The novel has been adapted into the film Blade Runner.

  What is cyberpunk?

  Computers, surveillance systems and the Internet all feature strongly in cyberpunk fiction – a fiction which is a mix of genres: the Western and Thriller, Sci Fi and Dystopian Fiction. It is the mix that makes it speak the postmodern condition so well, exploring not only capitalism, but also the decentring of the human consciousness in its innovative investigation of cyberspace.

  The term ‘cyberspace’ was created by William Gibson, a term applied to the space generated by software within a computer that produces a Virtual Reality experience, one which convinces our senses that we are in another world. However, more generally, cyberspace is the ‘nowhere space’ through which we can download information and become part of an online community. Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) is seen as the definitive cyberpunk text with its decentring of the human consciousness, its exploration of cyberspace, its preoccupation with late capitalism and its mix of genres.

  A novel compared with Neuromancer is Vurt by Jeff Noon. Vurt tells the story of Scribble and his gang, The Stash Riders, as they search for Desdemona. The novel is set in an alternative Manchester, one in which society is shaped by Vurt, a hallucinogenic drug-shared reality, accessed by sucking on colour-coded feathers. There is a re-telling of the myth, Orpheus Visit to the Underworld, in which Vurt explores what it means to be human in relation to the non-human.

  What are the themes in cyberpunk fiction?

  The themes that have been cited for Dick’s work are the dominant ones in cyberpunk fiction, for example, conspiracy theories, notions of being under surveillance, which leads to the loss of an individual’s privacy, issues of national security, debates concerning reality and the nature of information overload. The nature of time and anxieties about the past, the future and the present are also dominant themes.

  What fictional techniques do cyberpunk writers utilize in their work?

  Fundamentally, cyberpunk is more concerned with scientific ideas rather than plot and character; in this way it echoes the interests of other postmodern writers, in particular Jeff Noon, who has said that he is more interested in subject matter and atmosphere than he is in plot and character, and he is driven towards experimentation. His avant-gardism has never been exclusively literary. He cites music and the visual arts as central to the way in which he approaches his literary craft. In particular, it was when he was touring nightclubs with authors from the rave-scene anthology Disco Biscuits that he found his voice. Listening to a reader before him, while he waited for his turn to go on stage, he was aware of the techno-music pumping away in the next room, and it was overlapping the reading in a thought-provoking way. As a consequence of his disco days, Noon came up with the idea of dub, that is, early 70s reggae when the likes of the musician King Tubby would manipulate an already existing tune on the B-side of a vinyl using empty space and silence to reveal the skeleton of a tune. Noon then began to manipulate language in the same way that a musician manipulates music. He went on to develop remixing techniques, incorporating ‘samples’ in texts ranging from Shakespeare to racehorse names, best shown in his work: Cobralingus. In a sense, Noon’s approach is not dissimilar to the Beats’ cut-up technique.

  The Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, although not a cyberpunk writer, has also stated that disco culture, sampling and mixing were techniques he experimented within his fiction, especially in his collection of short stories The Acid House, in which he blends gritty realism with a crazy, drug-induced fantasy which impacts on the layout and typography of the texts.

  There are many fictional techniques cyberpunk writers use in their work. They break down barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’, relishing the use of popular generic forms which are playfully appropriated for their own fictional purposes, Noon’s fictions Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation combine classical myth and English folktale with drug fantasy, rave culture, cyberspace and overlays of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; these genres fuse and blur, melting borders.

  Science fiction is the most common genre used by cyberpunk writers; this is because it is a quintessentially modern genre, off
ering the chance to engage with contemporary scientific and technological ideas. The use of coded, techno, self-reflexive language which undoubtedly springs from postmodern concerns and writers’ anxieties is explicit in cyberpunk fiction. And in a fiction of conspiracy theories and surveillance, it comes as no surprise that these writers use fictional techniques such as multiple points of view to illustrate multiple realities and multiple truths in their work which, in turn, is utilized in an eclectic fashion, amid kitsch and randomly overlapping forms of media.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Scientific and Technological Ideas in Fiction

  Imagine a character in a novel who is in a computer game hacking through one system to another, discovering secret rooms and passageways, a web of interconnected worlds and ‘other’ characters. Write the scene using coded, techno, self-reflexive language to convey multiple points of view and multiple truths.

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  What Is True/What Is Not?

  This chapter explores writing techniques and strategies that contemporary writers employ in order to experiment with truth claims within their postmodern fiction, so that writers and readers of experimental fiction can experiment with these techniques too.

  What is true in a postmodern world?

  Postmodernity depicts an era where there is a loss of faith not just in progress, but in authority and tradition, a shift in what people believe to be true and what people actually believe in. Once people lived within a single coherent worldview or truth; now people are living in a world of plurality, an ‘over-exposure to otherness’ (Trutti Anderson Postmodernism Reader, p. 6) and a ‘barrage of cultural stimuli’ (p. 9). And so, with access to a multiplicity of rituals and symbols, beliefs and values, new variations of old concepts, individuals are able to pick and mix worldviews and lifestyles, leading to concepts of truth being revised.