Forum / Experimental

Ann Bogle
Jun 11, 06:43am

Interviewer:

Do you regard yourself as an experimental writer?

Gaddis:

No, I think of experimental as something that may not work. When I sit down with a concept and what I've said about discipline and so on -- what I'm going to do -- I don't think it's experimental.

Meg Pokrass
Jun 11, 06:56am

this is perfect. this what it should feel like, I believe. Not experimental, if it truly is.

Ann Bogle
Jun 11, 07:03am

I'm eating alive The Paris Review Interviews. The Gaddis interview is in volume II.

Today people all qualify the word "experimental" as having no definition, and they all stop there, as if to qualify it as "having no definition" is enough and clarifies something. Then no one is willing to say the word "experimental" except to qualify it thus. I was so struck by Gaddis' casual use of the word and its having a definite meaning to him (as "something that may not work"). So cool.

Robin Graham
Jun 11, 08:48am

It's a "snowflake" term at this stage, isn't it?
Which is to say, no two writers would understand the same thing by it.

Has anybody been more illuminating on this than D.Barthelme?

"...the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do"

RW Spryszak
Jun 11, 09:36am

I like writers who have gotten beyond categorizing their work and just do it. I think "experimental" can be an excuse as much as anything. We'll just slop some words around and see what happens. I don't think so. I'd rather read the piece, not see the work that went into making it.

It seems to me that ingenious writing isn't trying to be anything in particular. In the end it is still telling, or showing, or relating. The mechanics of how a writer does that aren't as interesting as the end result.

Now that I've gotten this many words out, what was the question? :-)

James Lloyd Davis
Jun 11, 12:54pm

Hopefully, all new writing is, to some extent, experimental. Any time a writer creates a new image, a twist in style, an abnormal use of tense, or a willful bastardization of grammar... it is an experiment.

If it weren't experimental in the respect that it is different, while still making sense to the reader, it would not be unique, but merely a copy of something that went before, and dull accordingly.

If I had only one wish for my writing, it would be, "Dear God, don't let it be dull."

The term 'experimental' denotes, for me, a matter of mechanics. Is there genius in the manipulation of stylistic deviance? Maybe, but when it crosses the line to the point of absurdity it fails the primary process of communication between the writer and the reader. Perhaps true genius is maintaining the acceptable balance between manipulation and a coherent result.

RW Spryszak
Jun 11, 04:45pm

Yes and yes on "communication between the writer and the reader." I see a lot of writing submitted to the zine that forgets this is the basic idea, and 5 times out of 10 it is accompanied by a note in the (unneeded) cover letter explaining that this is a brand new take on something. Yeah right. If the writer is doing her job no explanations are needed. It just sings.

Dolemite
Jun 11, 04:58pm

I agree with what JLD is saying about all writing being an experiment, even if the "experiment" runs no deeper than Can I write the essentially-same story/poem for the 128th time and get away with it...

To me the nature of the experiment is Can I capture of the essence of what is before me?

Some times it is a seemingly common event being approached with common tools. Other times the target of the artistic focus is very strange, requiring strange tools.

But the attempt, the essay, the desire is always the same. As is the target: catching the fish, be it minnow or Leviathan.

You can fail at the common as easily as at the strange. One is neither braver or safer than the other.

When mags use the word I take it as working code for Unusual. As such, the term is useful in that regard.

Christopher Allen
Jun 13, 06:54am

But isn't crossing the line into absurdity sometimes the attempt the writer has to take?

James Lloyd Davis
Jun 13, 05:02pm

Christopher, I hear you. The question should maybe be rephrased? Like, what is absurd? I would hold that absurd writing is that which speaks only to the writer and maybe a close circle of his or her friends. In which case, it's more like a fashion, an in-joke, of value only to the initiated, a secret handshake, a sign.

Doubtless you could make an entire thread here on the issue of the absurd, its definition, value, etc.

A non-sequitur may seem absurd at first, but it may indeed communicate more than a simple declarative. There are those who believe that nothing is more expressive than a properly designed metaphor, but only the writer can decide between the use of finely detailed clarity and fog made of words. Ultimately, the readers will be the judge of its value.

And, who do we write for?
Or, for whom do we write?

Years ago, I began using a word in nonsensical context at the beginning of a story that just wouldn't begin to write itself as the best ones so often do. Somehow, the use of that word helped me get started.

I'd always come back and delete it, of course, but one day, I'll leave it in. If it's a key, a primer, a blasting cap for me, shouldn't it make sense to anyone else? Maybe I'm only afraid to leave it there.

Probably not, but one day, I'll start an entire novel with that word, 'Billabong,' even though I've never actually seen one and if I did, there's probably a crocodile of a critic lurking just below the surface, grinning as crocodiles do, only waiting with infinite patience for me to wade in.

Christopher Allen
Jun 14, 05:05am

Hey, JLD! :)
I think my answer should have been rephrased.

When I use the word absurd, I use it in the context of the theatre of the absurd and absurdism in general: characters who cannot communicate with one another and who cannot change their circumstances, plots that spin in circles rather than rise and fall in arcs, and, yes, non sequiturs and expressions that seem to come out of the deep blue sky.

I'm putting the final touches on an absurdist satire that will come out later this summer. There are so many of these seemingly nonsensical explosions in the text, but I think there are reasons for them all (if merely to create the insanity of the character).

Ann Bogle
Jun 14, 11:24am

I scratched this out as notes in Padgett Powell's Summer Literary Seminars workshop two years ago in Montreal:

"overt non sequiturs v. covert sequiturs"

It was something Powell had said. It was very meaningful to me when I noted it, a break of sunshine on a hidden topic, a revelation, and Powell's Interrogative Mood, one of my favorite novels to read, novel with a question mark, : a novel? fits the sudden paradigm.

Christa Forster
Jun 14, 02:38pm

Experimental is what people call prose or poetry that they cannot "follow" overtly (re: Bogle's quote from Powell). And let's face it, most people like to be led and like to know where they're going when they're being led.

In an experimental story, the unfolding prose does not obviously lead the audience to the meaning; meaning is suspended in the process of reading the story. Reading a "traditional"story is like the act of stumbling upon a spiderweb with a fat, monster spider smack in the center (if it's a winsome story). Reading an "Experimental"story is like the act of walking through the spiderweb, accidentally, only realizing you've done so because you can feel its threads on your face.

I speak as an audience/reader here because I think it's the audience that defines the writing as "traditional" or "experimental," not the writer. The writer, as Gaddis and Bogle point out writes what she thinks is the truest way for her to write.

Ann Bogle
Jun 15, 05:31am

Consider this excerpt from Sam Lipsyte's story, "This Appointment Occurs in the Past" in the 201st issue of The Paris Review, Summer 2012, pp. 69-84, so not a very short story:

Davis called, told me he was dying.

He said his case was -- here was essence of Davis -- time sensitive.

"Come visit," he said. "Bid farewell to the ragged rider."

"You?" I said. "The cigarette hater? That's just wrongness."

"Nonetheless, brother, come."

"Who was that?" said Ondine, my ex-mother-in-law. I kissed her cream-goldened shoulder, slid out of bed.

. . .

AND THERE IS MORE, quite a lot more (the story is very quotable), and it leaps in its handling of time and space, and it conserves time and space by its exact renderings of locations and depictions of in-some-ways ordinary men and women, in some ways out of the ordinary, so that it comes across that Lipsyte doesn't want or doesn't bother to explain away shocks. He just slides by them, and time passes, quickly, and time lingers, serially.

Something in his textures is very fresh to me, but I do not know (as a reader, as Christa points out, readers decide) the exact connection between experimental and fresh.

Tantra Bensko
Jun 22, 04:18am

What an interesting thread. I love the spider web description, above.

The meaning of the term experimental fiction has interested in for a long time, and I have a website Experimental Writing, with a long list of publishers, articles, etc. relating to that topic. http://experimentalwriting.weebly.com/

I had a page in that website for exclusive work, and then turned that into Exclusive Magazine. So, all those writers give a commentary on what makes their work an example of experimental writing. http://experimentalwriting.weebly.com/exclusive.html

That was a fascinating exercise, finding so many ways experimentation could go, what it meant to the authors, why they chose to do those specific things. Presenting even to people who had only experienced traditional fiction before some sense of what people were doing with innovations in avant garde literature.

See ya
Jun 23, 06:09pm

Tags and labels should be reserved for Wal-Mart. Write words that will not allow you to gag them into silence and all else will be well. Somebody important said that once, or maybe it was me. Most likely somebody important.

Ann Bogle
Jul 30, 08:22am

Quoted at WHAT
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