Experimental Fiction

by Armstrong, Julie;

  Experiment with this: Learning to Re-tell History and Experiment with Juxtapositions of Narratives to Create a Non-linear Text

  Adopt two historical characters from two different periods of history. What are their stories? Write them, real or imagined. Revise the stories, juxtaposing the stories each tells the other about their lives, to create a non-linear text.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Create a Writerly Text

  Invent a city. Give it a name. Create a piece of fiction about this city, one like Calvino’s Zirma, in which there exists a plurality of realities.

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  What Is Real/What Is Not?

  This chapter investigates a postmodern worldview where perceptions of reality are constantly shifting; it reflects upon how the ever-intrusive media has led to a world of simulacra, a society saturated in simulations, a world where the real disappears behind the image. It also explores postmodern writers who question the nature of reality by showing that it is simply a construct within their fiction, and it investigates their writing techniques and strategies that enable them to do this.

  What is the real in the postmodern era?

  In the postmodern era, we are living with a multiplicity of realities and selves, raising questions about the nature of reality, language and human nature. As David Lyon’s writes, ‘One of the most basic themes of postmodern debate revolves around reality or multiplicity of realities’ (David Lyon, 1994, p. 7).

  In the twentieth century, the question is asked: How real can reality be when history is actually a story because it relies upon language? As Saussure suggests, language is arbitrary. In the twentieth century, the way reality is constituted questions all the key elements of the Enlightenment, that is, the Grand Narratives of religion, scientific progress, history. So, if all the Enlightenment realities are obsolete, what is left: Baudrillard’s hyperreality?

  The development of the media opens up an increased exposure to a multiplicity of perspectives undermining any belief in one true reality. In the world of media, reality and fantasy break down and are replaced by hyperreality, a world of self-referential signs, that is, signs referring to other signs – a world of simulacra, where the distinction between objects and their representations is dissolved, signs lose contact with things signified. TV advertisements are prime examples; flickering images, endeavouring to sell commodities, erode the distinction between the real world and that of the media, leaving us with Baudrillard’s hyperreality. ‘The sign has become reality, or the hyperreal; the sign, that is, masks the fact that there is no basic reality’ (Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. Semiotext, p. 1).

  Society is saturated with simulations so that the real dissolves behind the image. Each day we live through a collage of visual images: TV, cinema, advertisements. This brings into question the notion of reality, and this may be one way of seeing the postmodern, as a debate about reality. The idea that reality is broken down into many images is common within postmodern discourse, which begs the question: What is more real, the actual or the simulation? Baudrillard argues that Disneyland and theme parks are a ‘substitute for a diminishing sense of reality (p. 1), whilst Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, believes that ‘technology can give more reality than nature can’ (Eco, Travels In Hyppereality, p. 44). Debates are explored through fiction by some writers; for example, in his novel White Noise (1985) in Chapter 7, Don DeLillo illustrates that the publication of erotic letters in magazines may be more stimulating for their authors than the actual erotic experiences themselves; the idea being that the simulation replaces reality. This leads the reader to actively engage in the text by provoking them to ask the question: What is more real, the actual experiences or the publication of those experiences?

  How do postmodern writers illustrate the impact of the media?

  In White Noise, DeLillo investigates a society suffused with simulacra. Indeed, this novel is a creative study of the impact the media has on society, a society permeated with signs and images. Specifically, DeLillo explores the difficulty of choosing relevant, meaningful messages from the ‘White Noise’. Through the use of dialogue, DeLillo explores the idea that real events are constructed and interpreted through the media; therefore, they are only simulations of real events. For example, in Chapter 6, the character Jack drives his son, Heinrich, to school. Heinrich informs Jack that the radio said it was going to rain. Jack says that it is already raining, and that they don’t need to believe the radio over their own senses. However, Heinrich believes senses can lie and he refutes Jack’s argument. So, here the reader observes father and son debating the objectivity of reality, and posing the question: What is real and what is not? Is it what the characters experience through their senses? Or is it what they are told by the media? The reader is being shown two different versions of reality. Jack believes the reality of the senses to be more real, whereas Heinrich believes the reality of the media is more real. What does the reader believe?

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Investigate Simulation Through Dialogue

  Select a tourist site anywhere in the world. Imagine a character in a novel who is visiting this site. This character has only visited the gift shop, but they consider that they have experienced the real tourist site. Write a postcard from the character to their friend back home. Now imagine this: The friend, who has actually been to the site, receives the postcard; a telephone conversation between the two friends ensues, one in which they discuss their experiences of the tourist site. Write the conversation.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Explore the Real Through Dialogue

  Choose a real event that has been in the media in 2012. Imagine you are a journalist in a novel who is on a chat show on television. Through dialogue, re-tell this event to the viewers in the studio and those watching television. By using dialogue, write the conversations which display the reactions of the viewers in the studio, those watching at home and the characters who were involved in the real event.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to Examine the Media Through Dialogue

  Imagine two characters who are watching the weather forecast on TV. They are told it has been hot sun for days and this will continue for today, but it has been, and still is, raining. The friends had planned a picnic, one wants to go on the picnic, but the other does not, because of the rain. Write the conversation.

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  How do signs, images and slogans become the real in a postmodern world?

  The saturation of images, texts and narratives, together with consumer and entertainment choices, has created a ‘living symbiosis between industry, consumer and culture … the market itself becomes the greatest reality for a growing number in society’ (W Raeper, A Brief Guide To Ideas (Oxford, 1991, p. 334)). This is another theme explored in White Noise, the idea that the marketplace has become the real reality for many consumers.

  Shopping has become an experience of spectacle, where the customer can gaze at a glittering array of goods and images under the gaze of high-tech electronic surveillance within a climate-controlled, theme-park-inspired environment and this is the case for Wilder, a character in White Noise. Shopping, acquiring certain consumer items, is the greatest reality for Wilder. When he takes items off supermarket shelves, he becomes a symbol for the unthinking consumer. Having a limited vocabulary, Wilder thinks his consumer items speak for him, through their signs, images and slogans; they tell real stories about him. So, by acquiring the items, Wilder epitomizes the item’s reality; the item is him; and he is it. However, Jack wants to believe that human beings actually have an innate sense of reality, a common sense, intuitive version, and yet, Nazism disproves this notion. In the novel, DeLillo shows how Nazism illustrates how society is easily controlled by images and spectacle. So again the reader is left pondering: How is reality constructed?

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p; Experiment with this: Learning to Use Signs and Images in Fiction

  Imagine a scene from a novel set in a city where the abundant signs and images impact upon a character’s attitudes and behaviour. How and why do they impact upon the character? Write the scene.

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  How is reality constructed within postmodern fiction?

  Postmodern writers continually search and experiment with fresh forms, and new techniques, within their fiction, to enable readers to see how reality is constructed within their works; it also seeks to remind readers that they are simply reading fiction, which is, in itself, a construct. For example, at the opening of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino tells his readers: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller’ (p. 1).

  In their fiction, postmodern writers employ a technique called ostranenie, that is, the deformation of ordinary language – a technique identified by Viktor Shklovsky from the Russian Formalist school of thought. This technique seeks to make the habitual unfamiliar, thereby making reader see things differently and anew, so perceptions are kept fresh. Jon McGregor uses this technique at the beginning of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things:

  If you listen, you can hear it.

  The city, it sings. (p. 1).

  The writing devices, then, de-familiarize the reader’s automized conventions or perceptions and ‘make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’. ‘Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important … ’ (Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique (1917)). Shklovsky’s theory shows the reader that all versions of reality are constructed, that a literary text is not unified and organic; rather it is composed of various kinds of writing, techniques and devices, which can be assembled and interpreted in various ways. By drawing attention to its devices, an anti-realist or an experimental work of fiction is produced, which conveys plot as being just a vehicle for the devices. And as David Lodge says: ‘An experimental novel is one that ostentatiously deviates from the received ways of representing reality – either in narrative organisation or in style, or in both – to heighten or change our perception of that reality’ (David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, p. 105).

  How does a postmodern writer de-familiarize, and play with, a reader’s perceptions of reality?

  In Slaughterhouse-Five, the breakdown of a single reality drives the novel, with Kurt Vonnegut compelling the reader to question not only the novel’s realism, but reality itself; it leads the reader into a state of uncertainty, one of unfamiliarity, so much so that they are unsure where the real experience ends and the imagination begins. Vonnegut’s activity of relaying personal experience to the reader allows him to experiment with a move away from traditional fiction to a form where the author and reader, to a certain extent, become characters within the novel. Vonnegut is capturing an unreal experience, and he engages the reader to experience this unfamiliar reality by using a number of narrative strategies. The protagonist Billy is out of time; he experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively following a non-linear narrative. Vonnegut lays bare his technique in the novel, reminding the reader that they are reading a fiction by inviting them to observe the process and not to get lost in the narrative.

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  Experiment with this: Learning to De-familiarize a Reader’s Perceptions of Reality

  ‘All this happened, more or less’. But it was in 1962. The going to work part that morning was true. A guy really was killed in the street by a hired gunman. Another guy I knew really did go AWOL ‘I’ve changed all the names’. I thought it would be easy for me to re-tell the tale in a fiction. After all, I am a writer. ‘Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time’. He has gone to sleep an old man and awakened on that day …

  Using this as a starting point, tell the story …

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  Giving a Voice to Other

  This chapter explores how some historical changes have led to a multicultural society, and how, in turn, this has impacted on postmodern fiction; in addition, it investigates the techniques postmodern writers employ, so experimental readers and writers of fiction can incorporate them into their writing practice too.

  In the twentieth century, there have been profound historical changes which have impacted on the world of fiction. These significant changes, in particular the end of the Empire and the rise of the Black Power movement in the United States, have led to a significant increase in awareness in terms of racial identity. Throughout the last century, more and more people, for a variety of reasons – for example, political, and the acceleration of technology – have been crossing national and cultural borders. Indeed, borders are no longer so easily definable.

  Globalization has led to a rise in multiculturalism and cultural hybridity, terms associated with celebrating our postmodern, postcolonial world, a world which is now a rich melting pot of cultures, a world concerned with multiple, other voices, finding their own individual voice. As American artist Alex Grey writes, ‘ … postmodern pluralism embraces so many maverick points of view it can generate tolerance toward cultural difference’ (Alex Grey, The Mission of Art, p. 15).

  This postmodern era of transition brings once marginalized voices into the mainstream and celebrates their difference. As a result, writing coming out of this postmodern era has a strong sense of being in the process of change and portrays a world far less coherent and easily definable than previously. The construction of an other voice is a central element of postmodern fiction; this other voice is a voice which permits expression, negotiation, transformation and change. However, how was this other voice experienced in realist fiction?

  How are other voices experienced in realist fiction?

  Displacement is something many people encounter as a result of being uprooted from their place of birth. Some people voluntarily migrate or they are forcibly uprooted in search of work, a new way of life or escape from their countries because of war. As a consequence, themes of racism and exile, displacement and migration are common in the Commonwealth Literature of the 1980s. The Jamaican novelist Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), for example, deals primarily with the experience of an eleven-year-old girl, Hyacinth, who moved from exuberant Kingston to the less colourful Britain and the problems and adjustments she faced. A dominant theme of the writer Caryl Philips’ work is also one of displacement. This is the result of having been born in St Kitts in the eastern Caribbean to parents with roots in India, Africa and Madeira and growing up in Britain. This leads him to research the history of the slave trade in order to understand his identity; this becomes a backdrop for a number of his novels. V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Timothy Mo’s Sweet Sour (1982) all explore notions of displacement in realist forms. However, some writers have observed and experienced a shift in displacement and this has implications for their writing practice.

  What is the shift in displacement?

  As a result of the breakdown in the old truth claims and all the old certainties, identity is no longer fixed in terms of cultural roles; as a result, there is a shift in the way unbelonging is viewed so that individuals are free to explore and rejoice in difference. Postmodernism takes the idea of a fragmented self with the sense of displacement, veering in a positive direction, rather than one which is angst ridden. Here, the idea of displacement, seen as being negative in the traditional sense, is seen to be liberating and the idea of belonging to be simply a myth of origins. In the postmodern world, perspectives of the migrant, opposed to giving cause for lamentation, can be viewed as giving cause for celebration.

  How are postmodern writers exploring displacement?

  In true postmodern fashion, in his novel Midnight’s Children, 1981, the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie celebrates displacement, fragmented self and cultural difference, besides exploring colonialism, independence and the p
artition of India. Midnight’s Children is a novel of international modern history, a vast postmodern construct of oral and written narratives from the multi-cultural tradition. The narrative is told by Saleem Sinai and is set in the actual historical events. Saleem is born at midnight, 15 August 1947, when India gains independence from British colonial rule. Saleem has telepathic powers; he can hear the voices of the other ‘midnight’s children’, all born in that initial hour and all endowed with magical gifts. The book teems with these other voices, celebrating, in fictional terms, myriad life and language in conflict with an oppressive centre; in so doing, he creates a text which celebrates the inclusion of the marginalized, seeing them as valid opinions on the world. Saleem uses his telepathic powers to assemble a Midnight’s Children’s Conference. The aim of this conference is to reflect on the issues the diverse nation, India, faces in its early statehood, issues concerning linguistic, religious, cultural and political differences.

  In 1988, Rushdie published Satanic Verses to great controversy in the Muslim community. This book deals with the immigrant experience in Britain. Satanic Verses explores how migration fosters an awareness that perceptions of reality are fragile and that the politics of religion are manipulative; it also criticises Western materialism. One of the most important premises of the book is that migrants are defined by their otherness as a people where fusions occur, that is, unions between what they were and where they find themselves. This hybridity is inevitable and to be celebrated. On television, the character Saladin Chamcha sees a tree growing in England, which he thinks can take the place of a tree his father chopped down in India: