In addition to this shift in content, there is also a shift in the form of fiction. How has this come about? Fundamentally, the advances in technology and social media have impacted hugely on the ways fiction is now being created; for example, YouTube blurs the distinction between artist and consumer, leading to extra new creative forms and outpourings. People all over the world, via the internet, can collaborate on art works, so that there are a multiplicity of authors for a text; for example, the Johnny Cash Project and the Life and Day Project, a film portrait that gives fragmented views of our world and lives, and blurs the boundary between artist and consumer. Likewise, the documentary Britain in a Day, directed by Ridley Scott and Morgan Matthews, is a very similar project. On Saturday 12 November 2011, at the invitation of the directors, an eclectic range of British people captured their lives, the mundane, exciting, strange and amazing on camera. The text, crafted from more than 750 hours of footage including 11,526 clips submitted to YouTube, offers a view of twenty-first-century life in the UK. After the Olympics, an online archive was launched to showcase the full-length submissions from which this film is created. Some fiction also experiments with this inclusive creative process; narratives are created online using a plurality of authors. And so, it can be seen that ways of producing and distributing works are changing, all of which have impacted upon the form of fiction. There is a form known as Collaborative Fiction Writing. Ken Kesey experimented with this form in 1989 to produce a text, Caverns, one that had been created by himself and a creative writing class he taught. Since 2007, there has been Protagonize, a Collaborative Fiction Writing Community online, in which one author begins a story and others post different branches or chapters to it.
It is also interesting to note that the content of fiction can often be inspired by new technologies, for example, Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan’s Twitter fiction: Black Box.
There are now many alternative ways of making fiction and art works which have impacted on the way the reader/viewer absorbs creativity; these are often collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature. For example, the First Cut exhibition, at Manchester City Art gallery (October 2012 to January 2013), features work by contemporary artists who have been significantly inspired by the acts of writing and reading. Su Blackwell gives form to the scenes we imagine when we read literature. She cuts out imagery from books to create three- dimensional tableaux which are then placed inside display boxes. Fairy tales and folklore are rich subjects for Blackwell, although she does not exclusively use children’s books. In the work Wuthering Heights, 2010, she presents her interpretation of the moorland farmhouse of the title. Georgina Russell dissects and reconstructs old, discarded books from the cannon of literature. Whereas Chris Kenny, inspired by the Dadaists’ love of chance and randomness, collects phrases and sentences from hundreds of secondhand books, he then re-presents and subverts these text fragments, and constructs surreal narratives. In Rob Ryan’s works, text and imagery are entwined to highlight the importance of language. French artist Beatrice Coron’s work is inspired by everything she reads and contains various narratives: playful, but also macabre and challenging. Long-Bin Chen from Taiwan is inspired by the texts rendered obsolete in the face of our increasingly digital word; he recycles books to give them meaning. Andrea Dezso from Romania creates non-linear narratives which have a surreal quality. She is not prescriptive about how the works should be read, but invites the reader to create their own stories around the characters and environments, based upon their own dreams and experiences. And Danish siblings Martin and Line Anderson bring to life a novel by one of New Zealand’s most revered authors, Maurice Gee. The work entitled Going West works across a variety of creative practice, including, film, music, animation, graphic design and photography.
The writer and illustrator Leanne Shapton, who grew up in Canada and is now based in New York, tests the boundaries of what a book can be in her work that is interdisciplinary in form. Her first novel Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry (2009) describes a love affair in, texts and images, so that the story is told by a curator, instead of a narrator. Her book Swimming Studies described being a trainee Olympic swimmer, and is unconventional too, with its photographs of swimming costumes and sketches. Likewise her most recent work Was She Pretty? is a catalogue of ex-girlfriends. The inspiration for this work comes from staying at a boyfriend’s house and seeing pictures of his ex-girlfriends everywhere in the house.
Another Canadian writer Sheila Heti has become a literary sensation in the United States with her experimental novel, which is ground breaking in form: How Should a Person Be? This fiction, chosen by the New York Times as one of the best books of 2012, is a book of constructed reality based on recorded interviews with her friends, although facts of their lives are altered; it is structured like a literary version of reality television. This is a genre-defying novel, a mash-up of memoir, fiction, emails, transcribed conversations, self-help and philosophy, with themes such as friendship, sex and love, and which asks important questions about young women’s sexuality and their roles in late-capitalist society, whilst celebrating the power of female friendship.
What might have once been called vanity publishing has moved into the mainstream of the publishing industry. The bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey, which also explores female sexuality, began as a self-published work and also as a work of fan fiction, signifying a change in the relationship between readers and writers. The vanity publishing stigma has been lifted. Writers are now more at liberty to publish their own work, either online or in print, rather than being selected by agents and publishers to accept work that they deem worthy and saleable. And so, there is a real threat to traditional publishing houses, as more and more writers publish and promote their own work, as each day a new magazine, publishing company, website, blog or interactive forum springs up online.
Why is the realist novel in crisis?
There is a growing school of thought which believes that the realist novel is in crisis; this is the view of Professor of English David Shields, who resides at the University of Washington; he is the author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead and Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, an engaging work which presents the reader with a series of 617 alphabetically organized short provocations/statements/thoughts which encourage writers to produce work that is ‘Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like’ (p. 359) and to build work from scraps and embrace cross-formal experimentalism and plagiarism because ‘The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps’ (p. 327).
Shields suggests that here are a number of reasons why the realist novel is considered to be in crisis; for example, generic forms are exhausted, and too restricting. They do not reflect the complexities and subtleties of twenty-first-century life; they are too traditional, when traditions are changing. Realist novels are old-fashioned and stuck in the past. In this changing world where language is shifting and means of communications are constantly evolving, in particular social networking, Shields claims that it is time to create something new because realist novels are ‘moribund’, the reasons for this are ‘they are ignoring the culture around them, where new, more exciting forms of narration and presentation and representation are being found (or rediscovered)’ (D. Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, p. 262). Shields continues by saying, ‘Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though … channel surfing, trying to navigate the web … flies at us in bright splinters’ (p. 319).
Indeed, David Shields is not the only writer in recent years who has expressed dissatisfaction with the restrictions of realist fiction. British-born artist and writer Tom McCarthy, the author of fiction Remainder and C, who created the International Necronautical Society (INS) in 1999, which has led to installations and exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, from Tate Britain an
d the ICA in London to The Drawing Center in New York, too feels that someone needs to challenge the realist novel. McCarthy, who frequently writes on literature and art for publications including the London Review of Books, Artforum and the New York Times, has the view that the experimental, the avant-garde should not be ignored, and to do so would be akin to ignoring Darwin.
However, in her essay Two Paths for the Novel (The New York Review of Books, 2008), Zadie Smith compares Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder with Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland. She sees the two novels exemplifying competing strands in Western literature, the experimental Remainder and the realist Netherland. She argues that in healthy times the experimental and realist co-exist; however, currently times are not healthy and therefore the experimental novel maybe a fascination but it is a failure. In the light of McCarthy’s experimental novel, C, being short listed for the Booker Prize in 2010, and Tinkers by Paul Harding, with its lack of plot, shifts in tenses, fragmentation and hallucinatory quality, winning the Pulitzer Prize, it appears that some critics disagree with her views.
As outlined, it appears that we are living through changing times, times in which new experimental fiction is being created. The following chapters will explore what twenty-first-century writers are doing that is considered new; it will also show how they are doing it, so that readers and writers of experimental fiction can understand what these works are doing and use the practices within their own work too.
Beyond Postmodernism
This chapter investigates writers who are moving away from fiction which privileges style over content, in favour of work that searches for meaning within their fiction, whilst exploring spirituality and big questions. As well as addressing the content of beyond postmodernism fiction, this chapter will outline some of the techniques writers use, so that experimental writers can practise these techniques and strategies too.
Why are some writers moving away from postmodernism?
In post-Millennium, post-Christian, post-9/11 times, there are a number of writers and readers who are moving away from fiction that is all surface no depth; the superficiality of some postmodern fiction is losing its power to entertain. These readers and writers are not satisfied by fiction which simply revels in playfully mixing forms and rewriting narratives; they no longer feel liberated by work which sees itself as a celebration from fixed truths and beliefs, nor do they delight in uncertainty. As Alex Grey makes the point in The Mission of Art: ‘The current cultural situation is calling for individuals to transcend the fractured vision of postmodernism and awaken to some transpersonal and collective spiritual basis for truth and conscience’ (p. 15). It is evident that a new fiction is evolving, one in which writers are searching for meaning through their work, and are asking philosophical questions about why we are here, in a world where meaning seems lost, or at the least ambiguous. This fiction invites the reader to be active and not a passive consumer, because the writers of such work are asking the reader to consider how they view the world and how they live their lives.
Why are some writers embracing spirituality?
The twenty-first century is an age in a state of flux. This is a period of enormous change, a change that has been identified in terms of changing cultural, political, economic and social trends. In addition, we have taken a quantum leap in our scientific and spiritual beliefs, questioning the way reality is constituted.
Religion, which comes from the Latin word ‘religio’, meaning to tie, to bind, is contested, and is seen as an incommensurate way of knowing, where truth is forever shifting. And so, religion has been going through something of a revolution, breaking free from formal structures, imposed by patriarchal institutions that have held it together for centuries. Although there is a rise in more fundamentalist religions, there is a decline in church-based practice; this, together with the breakdown of Grand Narratives, upheaval of paradigms, war, political unrest, the recession and angst about the meaninglessness of consumer and celebrity cultures, has resulted in ‘other’ belief systems emerging in recent years. Emancipation from religion transmitted through dogma, and living in a world where the division between real and virtual life is breaking down, the individual, which includes the writer, is free to create their own reality and life meaning.
It appears that ‘ … the dawn of the twenty-first century is unique in that the great religions and indigenous peoples of the world have grown beyond their former cultural isolation, and many great spiritual teachers have travelled throughout the world fostering a sense of interfaith fellowship … The Dalai Lama of Tibet is an exemplar … I believe deeply that we must find, all of us together, a new spirituality’ (Alex Grey, p. 132). And it does seem that a new awareness may well be emerging, an expanding of consciousness; a consciousness that, it can be argued, has its roots in both the individual and the collective. As a result, writers are emerging who are investigating this expanding consciousness and are embracing spirituality; they are searching for meaning through their fiction.
What is the content of New Era fiction?
The New Era fiction does not collude with postmodernism’s abandonment with the search for meaning; nor does it embrace consumerism like many of the eighties and nineties writers explored in the postmodern section of this book. New Era fiction has a preoccupation with inner consciousness and examines the mind’s interior, in some ways, not unlike the modernist writers. However, the New Era writers are provoking readers to look for a different kind of meaning, a meaning which may be said to be rejecting old values, those of religious doctrine. The New Era fiction is concerned with the writer’s ideas and thoughts about spirituality. It can be argued that spirit (from the Latin ‘spiritus’ meaning breath, energy, force) motivates us to search for purpose in life, to enquire into our origins and identities, to endeavour to discover meaning and transcendence. Much can be said of the New Era writers, who create characters unlike the glamorous, passive, one-dimensional characters created by the Brat Pack writers. For example, the young British writer Grace McCleen in her novel The Professor of Poetry (2013) creates a very intense character: Elizabeth Stone. Professor Stones explores how ‘the mind is brought into contact with the spiritual’ (p. 222) and throughout the course of the book she engages in a passionate study of the works of T. S. Eliot and the music of poetry.
Some New Era fiction prompts its readers to reflect upon the world, and their place in it. It is work that is visionary and challenging. For example, The Age of Miracles by the American Karen Thompson Walker (2012) is a novel in which a giant earthquake knocks the Earth from its axis. The novel’s theme is topical in the light of events in Japan; the massive earthquake that struck the country shifted the planet on its axis and shortened the Earth’s day by a fraction of a second. In The Age of Miracles, however, a fiction narrated by a ten-year-old California girl, Julia, a quake shakes the planet causing the Earth’s rotation to slow and days to lengthen, first by six minutes, then twelve minutes, then twenty-four. As the phenomenon, called the slowing, takes hold, days stretch to forty-eight hours, and gravity weakens. As a result, astronauts become stranded far from Earth and birds cease to fly.
The Age of Miracles netted a £500,000 publishing deal, almost unprecedented in such turbulent economic times. And Simon & Schuster fought off eight other publishers to land the deal. Suzanne Baboneau considered The Age of Miracles to be a novel of big ideas. She says, in a note to the reader at the beginning of the book: ‘You are about to read a novel that we believe is very special indeed … it is one of those rare novels that make us consider the way we look at the world, at how we structure our days and, beyond that, how easily the Earth could be knocked out of kilter and how our lives, as we know them, could alter forever … ’. Clearly, this fiction has depth and is not superficial in tone; far from it, it is fiction that is asking its readers to think, and consider issues that could actually happen, and what human beings might do in such circumstances. For example, what might characters do at ‘the end of times’. Julia’
s friend, Hanna, is a Mormon, who had once told her that ‘ … the church had pinpointed a certain square mile in Utah as the exact location of Jesus’ next return to earth. They kept a giant grain silo there, she said, to feed the Mormons during the end times’. However, Julia’s ‘ … own family’s religion was a bloodless breed of Lutheranism – we guarded no secrets, and we harboured no clear vision of the end of the world’ (p. 25). It is therefore very poignant when Hanna and her family were preparing to leave for Utah:
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Utah”, Hanna said. She sounded scared.
“When are you coming back?” I asked.
“We’re not” ’, she said.
I felt a wave of panic. We’d spent so much time together that year that teachers sometimes called us by one another’s name.
The British writer and academic Scarlett Thomas also creates characters who engage in debates about big ideas and pose big questions; for example, in Our Tragic Universe, she writes:
‘But isn’t the point of being alive to try to answer the big questions?
I shook my head. For me it’s about trying to work out what the questions are’. (Scarlett Thomas, Our Tragic Universe, Canongate, 2010, p. 400)
Sum Forty Tales from the Afterlives by the neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman is a collection of short stories which are concerned with the mystery of human existence, stories which ask questions such as: What happens to a person when they die? And what does it mean to be human? Undoubtedly death is a concept central to spiritual beliefs, one being explored by a number of writers in the twenty-first century, as Scarlett Thomas writes in Our Tragic Universe: ‘Death has to be what defines life’ (p. 209).
The work of British-born writer David Mitchell is interesting in that he employs some postmodern strategies, such as the use of interlocking narratives; for example, his (1999) novel Ghostwritten has nine intersecting narratives. His work Number9dream (2001) interweaves narratives and uses cultural signifiers, John Lennon, for example. However, this work illustrates the desire human beings have to create meaning in their lives and to have something to believe in. Number9dream is set in Japan; it is Eiji Miyake’s search for the father he’s never met. Told in the first person by nineteen-year-old Eiji as he approaches his twentieth birthday, this fiction breaks convention by juxtaposing Eiji’s imaginative journey towards identity through Tokyo’s postmodern underworld, that is, video arcades, computer games and films, a plurality of realities, with his journey to find his father, a journey which represents the human desire to have meaning in life. Eiji is searching for meaning in a postmodern, late-capitalist society where there appears to be no meaning, but he has discovered a meaning, to find his father.
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