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Experimental Fiction

V

Violanthe

New Member
What fiction have you read or seen that is experimental? Stories told in an out-of-the-ordinary way? Stories that don't stick to the traditional conventions of fiction? Have you enjoyed them? Do you seek them out on a regular basis, or reserve them for rare occasions?
 
I just finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime. That seemed pretty experimental to me. I loved it.
 
Obviously everyone's going to have different interpretations of "experimental" (for instance, "The Curious Incident..." struck me as pretty straight-forward; a good novel, but hardly experimental, just an unusual narrator). Not to mention that some people seem to believe that "experimental" simply means piling words on top of each other without any thought process behind it.

But I think the weirdest I've read would be William S Burroughs "The Ticket That Exploded". All cut-up and randomly pieced together until it's almost impossible to follow without reconstructing it according to your own subconscious. There are people who say they can find a clear narrative in it. Well, I couldn't. But there is definitely some sort of theme, some sort of plot buried somewhere in there that it's a lot of fun trying to find. Whether I would want to read any more novels like that, though...

What would you consider experimental, Violanthe? Can you name a few such novels that you've read?
 
I thought that Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami was a little experimental, but not overly really if that makes any sense.

It depends on how you look at things - books like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer could be seen as experimental simply because of the page layout I suppose.

I wouldn't say that I actively seek out any particular type of book really, I just like reading and that may be anything!
 
I would think that experimental fiction would mean books such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, House Of Leaves and Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Unlimited Dream Company by JG Ballard, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, A Closed Book by Gilbert Adair, Ella Minnow Pea and Iibid: A Life by Mark Dunn, the novels of Italo Calvino, the novels (from what I hear) of Milorad Pavic, and two that Shade put me onto, one of which I want to have a look at (I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine) and one I don't (Damascus by Richard Beard).
 
Stewart said:
I would think that experimental fiction would mean books such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, House Of Leaves and Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Unlimited Dream Company by JG Ballard, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, A Closed Book by Gilbert Adair, Ella Minnow Pea and Iibid: A Life by Mark Dunn, the novels of Italo Calvino, the novels (from what I hear) of Milorad Pavic, and two that Shade put me onto, one of which I want to have a look at (I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine) and one I don't (Damascus by Richard Beard).
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Their importance aside for a moment, what makes them experimental?
 
abecedarian said:
Their importance aside for a moment, what makes them experimental?
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Different FORMS of storytelling as a purpose in itself, perhaps? Not just weird plots and quirky characters, but trying to find new ways in which a story can be told?

I guess Georges Perec's novels might qualify too. He apparently thought that the ultimate goal of any modernist should be to write a completely new type of novel every time... and so he wrote one without the letter E, one made up entirely of short unrelated scenes from an apartment building, one made up of a bunch of short sentences all starting with the words "I remember..."
 
beer good said:
Different FORMS of storytelling as a purpose in itself, perhaps? Not just weird plots and quirky characters, but trying to find new ways in which a story can be told?

I guess Georges Perec's novels might qualify too. He apparently thought that the ultimate goal of any modernist should be to write a completely new type of novel every time... and so he wrote one without the letter E, one made up entirely of short unrelated scenes from an apartment building, one made up of a bunch of short sentences all starting with the words "I remember..."
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Thanks for the clarification. I've heard the term, but not seen a definition that wasn't book lenghth..
 
Stewart said:
I would think that experimental fiction would mean books such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, House Of Leaves and Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, The Unlimited Dream Company by JG Ballard, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, A Closed Book by Gilbert Adair, Ella Minnow Pea and Iibid: A Life by Mark Dunn, the novels of Italo Calvino, the novels (from what I hear) of Milorad Pavic, and two that Shade put me onto, one of which I want to have a look at (I, the Divine by Rabih Alameddine) and one I don't (Damascus by Richard Beard).
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abecedarian said:
Their importance aside for a moment, what makes them experimental?
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Ulysses plays with form. One minute it's a bit of narrative, then it's off into a stream of consciousness passage, then there's bit where it switches to a play. It jumps about from style to style.

Finnegans Wake is circular in that it opens with the latter half of a sentence that, when you get to the end, you find it ends with the first half. It plays with multilingual puns, catalogues neologism after neologism, and is pretty much unreadable. It took him eighteen years to write.

House Of Leaves reads like a literary matryoshka. And within that there's narrative, there's footnotes telling the story, there's reports. On top of that, there's sections where the number of words on the page reflects the pace of the novel so when it picks up you find yourself flying through the book faster as there's only one word per page. The layout, at times, also reflects where the characters are or what they are doing in the story.

Only Revolutions tells two narratives. One from the back of the book and one from the front. You read eight pages, turn the book around, read the next eight pages. So the two stories are in tune with each other rather than to be read separately. There's also all other manner of meaningless - to me, at a glance - stuff down the side of each page.

The Unlimited Dream Company is one big flight of fancy, playing with what can and can't happen in our world.

The Waves uses a strange method of dialogue to tell the story, with the characters uttering strange sentences, for the whole book, like this:

"I see a ring," said Bernard, "hanging above me. It quivers and hang s in a loop of light."
"I see a slab of pale yellow," said Susan, "spreading away until it meets a purple stripe."
"I hear a sound," said Rhoda, "cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down."
"I see a globe," said Neville, "hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill."
"I see a crimson tassel," said Jinny, "twisted with gold threads."
"I hear something stamping," said Louis. "A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps."
"Look at the spider's web in the corner of the balcony," said Bernard. "It has beads of water on it, drops of white light."
"The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears," said Susan.
"A shadow falls on the path," said Louis, "like an elbow bent."
"Islands of light are swimming on the grass," said Rhoda. "They have fallen through the trees."
"The birds are bright in the tunnerls between the leaves," said Neville.
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A Closed Book is told completely in dialogue also. There's no he said, she said. You know who is talking via their voice. This book is by the guy who translated Perec's La Disparition, mentioned by beer good above, in to A Void. From no e in French, to no e in English.

ella minnow pea is increasingly lipogrammatic. ibid: a life is a biography where the main text is lost, but only the footnotes remains.

Italo Calvino was into all sort of tricks. The Castle Of Crossed Destinies, from browsing it, seems to have been made by selecting tarot cards and then writing fiction based on the outcome. Mr Palomar, from what I've read, is more a series of deep interpretations of things we take for granted: such as the sea, the sun, and breasts.

Milorad Pavic, while I've never seen his books, I have read about. I'm keen to read his Dictionary Of The Khazars which I believe is a novel as a dictionary where you can read the entries in order to understand the story of the Khazars. Someone may correct me if I'm wrong.
 
Well there is THIS.

What about Time's Arrow - Martin Amis. The story is told backwards, it starts with the character in old age and literally rewinds through his life, so that everything (the conversations, sex etc) are done in reverse.
 
Gem said:
What about Time's Arrow - Martin Amis. The story is told backwards, it starts with the character in old age and literally rewinds through his life, so that everything (the conversations, sex etc) are done in reverse.
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Oh, I liked that book. One quibble: it begins with him undying. ;)
 
I'm pretty conservative: I despise anything that doesn't conform to sentence-building grammar rules. So I have little interest in reading some works by James Joyce, William Burroughs or Samuel Beckett. I'm not so put off by inadequate use of punctuation.

I definitely have very little interest in junkie Burroughs, who not only wrote without seeming to understand the basic rules of syntax, but he was high on drugs too, which contrary to popular knowledge do not further imagination, so his work is twice as devoid of content.

You know, there's a lot of talk about the subconscious being necessary to understand these guys and all that post-modernist nonsense, but if Chomsky is right (and believe he is), human thought has a universal grammar (some call it Mentalese), to which every language in the world adheres. So grammar rules are a reflection of our thoughts' structure, and so communication depends on following those rules. When they're not, communication is impossible, which means Joyce and Burroughs are making fun of everyone who thinks they can find meaning in an incoherent string of words without an underlying structure holding them together.
 
I knew someone would say that. What can I do, I must save José Saramago.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself :D
 
I would add BS Johnson, and agree that experimental means telling the story in an unusual way. Johnson wrote a book (The Unfortunates) which was presented as a set of unbound chapters, so you could rearrange them any way you like. He wrote another (House Mother Normal) where each character has 21 pages for their story, and the same things happen on each line of each page throughout all the characters' sections. He also wrote one (Albert Angelo) where some pages had holes in them so you could see through to what happened later in the book.

Generally I love the idea of experimental fiction, but the experience does not always match up.
 
Stewart said:
House Of Leaves reads like a literary matryoshka. And within that there's narrative, there's footnotes telling the story, there's reports. On top of that, there's sections where the number of words on the page reflects the pace of the novel so when it picks up you find yourself flying through the book faster as there's only one word per page. The layout, at times, also reflects where the characters are or what they are doing in the story.
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That one sounds really interesting. Is it relatively easy to read, or is it more on par with the likes of Joyce?
 
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