Experimental Fiction
Page 17
The content of New Era fiction is often suffused with spirituality, for example, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. This fiction, although conventional in form, that is, it follows the structure of a quest plot, ponders upon big questions. The protagonist, Harold Fry, walks from one end of Britain to the other, meeting a variety of characters along the way and he learns a variety of lessons from each character that he meets. The key to the novel appears to be discovered in the epigraph, at the beginning of the text, which quotes John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘ … His first avowed intent To be a pilgrim’. Harold does not believe in God, although he can be viewed as the contemporary equivalent of Bunyan’s Christian. He is walking to atone for the mistakes he has made in his life, and to reflect upon his life in the face of death, that is, the imminent death of a former colleague, Queenie Hennessy. ‘He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others’ (p. 87).
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Experiment with this: Learning to Write Reflectively
Create a character embarking on a pilgrimage. Who are they? What is the catalyst for them embarking on a pilgrimage? Where are they starting from and where are they going to? Describe the pilgrimage and the characters the protagonist meets on the way: allow the protagonist to ‘accept the strangeness of others’, and to reflect upon their life and the mistakes they have made.
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All Is Song by Samantha Harvey is another fiction which poses many thought-provoking questions, inviting the reader to reflect upon such issues as: ‘What is love? – Is it beauty? Is it spirituality?’ (p. 95). In addition, there is considerable debate throughout the narrative upon the nature of belief: ‘Pa asked me … what the nature of your faith was … I said you believed in a supreme being’ (pp. 62–3). Also, the anxieties and ‘enormous unrest in the world … Every age has its unrest … but this one more so … ’ (pp. 70–1). Michael Symmons Roberts debates ethical questions in his fiction Breath, a narrative which is a meditation on the nature of forgiveness, duty, absolution and faith.
And Scarlett Thomas reflects upon belief systems in Our Tragic Universe: ‘In Taoism, it’s only nothingness that gives anything meaning’ (p. 151). Likewise, Nicole Krauss, in Man Walks into a Room: ‘The Bible, yes. Do you like it? … I’m starving for glory … My head was full of all this Hindu stuff, which was all well and good, except I hadn’t thought about Jesus since I was a kid and my Sunday school teacher told me Jesus was my only true friend’ (pp. 198–9).
The Zen Buddhist priest, award-winning novelist and film maker, Ruth Ozeki, who was born and raised in Connecticut by an American father and a Japanese mother, explores spirituality in her fiction A Tale for the Time Being, a narrative about the ways in which reading and writing connect people who will never meet: Nao, a school girl from Tokyo, and Ruth, a woman who lives in British Columbia. As a result of a tsunami, Nao’s diary is washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunch box and Ruth finds it. This rich and complex fiction is a meditation on Zen philosophy, environmental issues, time, memory and quantum physics, a fiction inscribed with Japanese writing, different fonts, footnotes and a cross pollination of cultures. Part 1 opens with, ‘For The Time Being’, the eleventh chapter of The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye by the author and Japanese master Dogen Zenji. Throughout the narrative, the reader is invited to contemplate on the nature of human conscience, what it means to philosophize and to study the self.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Explore Big Questions Through Fiction
Imagine a character who is at a cross roads in their life. Through dialogue and interior monologue write a section from a novel in which they debate big questions; choose one, two or all of these: what is the nature of self/beauty/truth/death/faith? Also have the character reflecting upon the twenty-first century and their place in it.
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In addition to debating big questions, New Era fiction can also be seen to be questioning postmodern culture; Scarlett Thomas, in particular, does this. As Meg says, ‘I hate celebrity culture; it’s just another form of clichéd narrative entertainment’ (Our Tragic Universe, p. 104). Later, in the novel: ‘unless we gave up on … twenty four hour drama and entertainment, we were in danger of turning ourselves into fictional characters with no use beyond entertaining people … We would become little more than character arcs, with nothing in our lives apart from getting to act, two and then act three and the dying’ (Our Tragic, pp. 336–7).
What is the form of New Era fiction?
Some of the form of New Era fiction is traditional, for example, as already mentioned, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. The fiction of Scarlett Thomas is also traditional realist in form, a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, but with the characters dropping in and out of deep philosophical discussion about our tragic universe.
However, the form of Sum by David Eagleman may be described as very short stories where each piece tells a completely different version of the afterlife. There is a message behind the stories, which is: we don’t know whether there is an afterlife or not. These stories can be said to be more philosophical debates than actual fiction; for example, Adhesion reads: ‘Our life on Earth represents an experiment in which they are trying to figure out what makes people stick together’ (p. 34) and Conservation: ‘What we have deduced about the Big Bang is almost exactly wrong’ (p. 84). The fiction is often told in second-person point of view in spare, factual language.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Form
Using a second-person point of view, write a very short piece, using stark, scientific language, on afterlife. Have a message behind the fiction, which is: we don’t know, the afterlife cannot be proven.
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The History of Love by Nicole Krauss has been described as a complex Russian-doll structure; a narrative inside another inside another. The form is fragmented. There are multiple voices, multiple narrative strands set out on the page in blocks of text; for example, graphics are also used throughout the fiction (p. 196). The form, therefore, is not dissimilar to postmodern fictions, that is, self reflexive and fragmented. However, the content of the work is all depth. Krauss meditates upon war, loneliness, death and human resilience. Likewise her novel Man Walks into a Room is an engaging narrative as well as a philosophical read: ‘What if we defined the spiritual aspect of human nature as the need to belong – be it at some cosmological, biological, or social level. What people call spiritual experiences usually involve a sudden feeling of being supernaturally connected in some way, right?’ (p. 104).
The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer, which explores the mental health issues of his protagonist, Matthew, also has a complex narrative structure and experiments with graphics and fonts. In addition to writing his family’s story within the book, Matthew also draws a family portrait which conveys this Russian-doll narrative structure:
I took one of the framed pictures of Simon from the mantelpiece – the one of him beaming proudly in his new school uniform – and drew it on the little table beside the couch, where we kept the newspapers. I drew Mum beside him, then myself between her and Dad … Self-portraits are the hardest. It’s hard to capture your own self, or even know what it is. In the end I decided to do myself with a sketchbook on my knees, drawing a picture. And if you look carefully, you can make out the top of the picture – and it’s the one we’re in.
I think that’s sort of what I’m doing now too. I am writing myself into my own story, and I am telling it from within. (p. 199)
The content of this work is all depth, too; it insightfully explores the bond of a family and the impact the death of Simon has on each family member, in particular his brother, Matthew.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use a Russian-Doll Narrative Structure, that is, One Narrative Inside Another, Inside Another
Use the theme Love. Experim
ent with multiple narrative, multiple voices and fragmentation. Allow the multiple voices to debate the theme of love; focus on the voices’ spiritual development which evolves as a result of the debate.
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Changing Perceptions of Reality
This chapter explores the ways in which our beliefs about reality are being challenged as boundaries of art, reality, social networking, celebrity, advertising, marketing and publicity are becoming increasingly blurred, so that the experimental reader can understand how these boundaries are being challenged and the writer can experiment with techniques that enable them to do this too.
What is real in the twenty-first century?
When writing about how the real is viewed in the twenty-first century, Professor David Shields writes in Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: ‘We seek new means of creating the real’ (p. 54). These new means of creating the real appears to be linked to a more conscious manipulation of the real and truth, concepts relevant to social networking, which inspired Lottie Moggach to write her debut novel Kiss Me First. The book explores how social networking is affecting our sense of reality, truth, identity and our connections with others and shows that virtual relationships are based on blurring reality. Online, people have the opportunity to present unreal images of themselves, so that they can be seen as they would like to be seen, rather than how they actually are, and friends often accept these images without question. Therefore, anything posted could be a lie, even the fact that someone existed at all; this is the premise of the novel. Tess wants to commit suicide without her family and friends knowing she has gone, and so she hires Leila to take over her virtual life following her death, assuming her identity, answering emails, operating her Facebook page, and she does, until the cracks between real and virtual lives appear.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Manipulate the Real
Write a scene from a novel in which a protagonist manipulates ‘friends’ by presenting unreal facts, images and stories online. Write a second scene where the protagonist is seen in the real world as they actually are, rather than how they want to be seen.
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Manipulating the truth and reality can also be the means by which an author creates an image in order to sell a product, a book, for example, Sarah by J. T. Le Roy. Sarah is an autobiographical narrative written by Mr J. T. Le Roy (Jeremiah ‘Terminator’ Le Roy). This fiction is about life as a truck-stop prostitute in California, told by a 12-year-old boy, nicknamed, Cherry Vanilla, who aspired to be a girl.
The controversial subject matter in Le Roy’s work created interest and various journalists sought out his identity. Le Roy, claiming to be shy, appeared in public in blonde wig, big shades, hat, protected by his family, claiming they were there to protect him from temptations of his former life as a drug addict. However, an article in New York magazine, by Stephen Beachy, in October 2005, raised the possibility that Mr Le Roy didn’t exist and suggested that Ms Laura Albert might be the author, saying that he felt the ‘hoax’ was a promotional device. Ms Albert later confirmed this, claiming that Mr Le Roy was a ‘veil’ and not a ‘hoax’. By writing as Le Roy, she was able to write things she could not have done as Laura Albert. However, the work being passed off as autobiography was clearly a fiction. A media frenzy ensued as Mr J. T. Le Roy’s readers came to terms with the fact that they had been duped by an elaborate literary hoax.
In January 2006, The Times named the person who had appeared in disguise as Mr Le Roy was, in fact, Savannah Knoop, the half-sister of Ms Albert’s partner, Geoffrey Knoop. In July 2007, Antidote International Films, which had bought the rights to adapt ‘Sarah’, sued Ms Albert for fraud; she had signed documents as J. T. Le Roy. She was ordered to pay $350,000 in legal fees. The trial, covered by Alan Feuer, for the Times, was: ‘an oddly highbrow exploration of a psyche-literary landscape filled with references to the imagination’s fungible relation to reality and the bond that exists between the writer and the work’. In 2008, Savannah Knoop published Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy, a memoir about her years spent as Le Roy.
The Le Roy case has been compared with that of James Frey author of the memoir A Million Little Pieces. In January 2008, the Smoking Gun website published an article alleging that Frey fabricated large parts of his memoir. There was one incident, in particular. This was in 1986, when a car-train crash took place in Michigan, while Frey was high on crack; he was imprisoned. After initial support from his publishers, and Oprah Winfrey, who defended Frey on TV, facts later emerged that the incident had been altered and embellished. Later, on Winfrey’s TV show, Frey admitted he lied to her; in fact he had spent a few hours in jail, not the 87 days that he had claimed in his memoir. Frey concluded that he was writing about a character he’d created in his mind to help him cope with his addiction, a character more aggressive than the ‘real’ him. This too provoked a media frenzy.
In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields enters the memoir debate: ‘How can we enjoy memoirs, believing them to be true, when nothing, as everyone knows, is so unreliable as memory? … We remember what suits us, and there’s no limit to what we can forget’ (p. 25). ‘ … memoirs really can claim to be modern novels, all the way down to the presence of an unreliable narrator’ (pp. 25–6). In terms of the Frey case, he writes, ‘I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one. He should have said, Everyone who writes about himself is a liar. I created a person meaner, funnier, more filled with life than I could ever be’ (p. 43). But surely his most interesting point, which can be attributed to the Frey and Le Roy case, is that ‘Capitalism implies and induces insecurity, which is constantly being exploited, of course, by all sorts of people selling things’ (p. 44). Of course, this includes the sale of books, but should readers’ insecurities be manipulated? Should readers be exploited and duped by literary hoaxes? Should the real person who has written the book be named as the real author on the cover? If a reader is told they are reading a memoir, should they expect the work to be true? But in the twenty-first century, when our beliefs about truth and reality are constantly shifting, do we know what is true or real anymore? Is it inevitable that the boundaries of art, reality, advertising, marketing and publicity will become increasingly blurred in a consumer society? Hasn’t the market already become the real reality for many consumers? Without doubt, there are a number of ethical issues and implications for both the reader and writer of fiction that need to be addressed.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Debate the Real Using Dialogue
Write an extract from a novel in which two characters disagree about what they consider to be real. Use dialogue to reveal their beliefs.
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To return to memoir, may be David Shields has a point when he says that when writing memoir the writer is simply using ‘the nuts and bolts of your own life to illustrate your vision. It isn’t really me; it’s a character based on myself that I made up in order to illustrate things I want to say … memoir is as far from real life as fiction is’ (p. 39). It is simply the duty of the writer to persuade the reader that the ‘narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand’ (p. 40). So, has Shields a point? Is truth achieved not through the re-telling of real events, but when ‘the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand?’ Is it the case that, what really happened to the writer isn’t what matters? ‘What matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened’. And for this, as Shields claims: ‘For that the power of the imagination is required’ (pp. 41–2).
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use the Power of the Imagination
Under the guise of memoir, write about an experience that did not actually happen but write about it in such a way as to persuade the reader that it did in order to ‘get to the bottom of the experience at hand’.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use Writing Bursts
Choose ONE of the following writing bursts and continue the story:
(1) The figure in this scene is a version of myself or at least someone I used to be …
(2) I remember bits and pieces …
(3) This was what I was told … but I remember it like this …
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Anti-Novels Built from Scraps