Experimental Fiction

by Armstrong, Julie;

  “He knows I am trying to escape”, announced Daniel Miller, abruptly.

  “Who does? Who knows?”

  “The Author”. (p. 1)

  Therefore, postmodern writers are free to create narratives which question fiction, exposing fiction as fiction, questioning fiction’s own relation to the real. Postmodern writers create narratives which ask such questions as: what is a writer, a reader, a narrative?

  What are the similarities and differences between postmodern and modern fiction?

  There are many similarities between the modern and the postmodern; both movements are concerned with experimentation and fragmentation and both question what constitutes reality. And yet, there are also differences; for example, modernism is exempt from the implication in popular culture; it partly defines itself by separation from the popular, unlike postmodernism, which relishes popular and consumer culture and celebrates it, which can be best illustrated in the fiction of Douglas Coupland and the American writers Brett Easton Ellis and Don DeLillo, fiction that will be explored later in this section.

  For the postmodern writer, fragmentation is playful and a celebration of the liberation from fixed truths and beliefs; they delight in difference and uncertainty and revel in playfully mixing ‘high’ with ‘popular’ cultural forms, the material and the spiritual, tradition and the new, to generate novelty and creativity. In addition, postmodern writers recycle narratives, genres and discourses, in an eclectic fashion, so that there appears to be nothing more than surface, no depth, no significance. This celebration of flexibility, play and self-reflexivity is a central element of postmodern fiction.

  The modern writer, by contrast, laments fragmentation, seeing it as symptomatic of a systematic collapse of meaning and value. Modern is also exempt from the implication in popular culture; instead, it partly defines itself by its separation from the popular. Modern fiction strove for an accepted, albeit elusive truth, whereas postmodern fiction questions the possibility of saying something truthful in a world where there is no longer an agreement on what truth or reality is. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale considers modernism to be dominated by epistemological questions, that is, modernism questioned ways in which reality can be known. Fiction foregrounds questions such as: How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it? Other questions include, What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty? McHale speaks of modern, epistemological devices: ‘the multi-implication and juxtaposition of perspectives’, and of the existence of a ‘single centre of consciousness’ (McHale, 1987, p. 9).

  Postmodernism, however, is dominated by ontological questions, that is, postmodernism questions whether reality is knowable at all (McHale, p. 9). There are ‘multi-implication and juxtaposition of perspectives’ but there is not ‘a single centre of consciousness’.

  However, as Tim Woods says, ‘Modernism tore up unity and postmodernism has been enjoying the shreds’ (Woods, 1999, p. 8). This implies that postmodernism is a sophisticated modernism, one that is no longer characterized by angst, seeing change as a nightmare, quite the reverse to postmodern, which sees change as inevitable; this can be displayed in the work of the British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, to be investigated in this section too.

  And so, postmodernism does what modernism does, but in a celebratory manner, rather than a nostalgic, pessimistic one. Modernism’s multiplication of perspectives can be seen as leading to postmodernism’s dispersion of voices, and modernism’s collage can be seen as leading to postmodernism’s self-conscious genre-splicing and mixing. In addition, the deconstruction of signs and their reconstruction allows the modern writer to create new meaning through juxtaposition. In contrast, postmodern fiction, by its very practice of playful fragmentation and intertextuality, collapses all meaning.

  What does postmodern fiction represent?

  Postmodern fiction is fiction which represents an immense power of ideas and can promote a whole new way of thinking about language, representation and communication. It is a fiction which goes beyond contemporary reality, rejecting the boundaries of time and space, science and mythology, therefore creating new fictions to reflect the new world and our multiple narratives, multiple selves and multiple points of view. It is a fiction which explores debates concerning reality, science, religion, history, consumer culture, technology, representations of gender and sexuality.

  Postmodern writing revives forms of writing from the past whilst experimenting with media-based forms of the future, fiction that will be explored in this section of the book, in order that readers of experimental fiction can learn about the historical era, postmodernity, and understand what postmodern writers are doing within their texts. In addition, writers of experimental fiction can become familiar with postmodern techniques and experiment with them in their own writing practice.

  Identity in Flux

  In order that readers of experimental fiction can comprehend what the term ‘identity in flux’ means, this chapter explores the new representations of gender, the body and sexuality in postmodern fiction; it will also outline what can be attributed to these new representations in literary works, works that are deemed to be experimental, in terms of both form and content. Therefore, writers of experimental fiction will be able to explore these ‘new’ forms and content, as well as techniques and strategies, within their own work.

  What has contributed to new perceptions of gender, the body and sexuality in the postmodern era?

  Even as far back as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex claimed that gender, as distinct from biological sex, is a construct, something made by society, that is, one is not born a woman. If gender, then, is a construct and can be changed, manipulated and even performed, it can be viewed as a facet of a multiple, contradictory, fluid identity, one, that is, in flux.

  Since the 1980s and 1990s, the world has become ever more complex and fluid; borders have fallen or have been crossed, access to the Internet has increased, so that individuals are learning to comprehend a multiplicity of view points and many ways of experiencing reality and identity. As Ian Gregson writes in Postmodern Literature, ‘ … a stable sense of identity has been persistently undermined’ (p. 41). It is a world where many of the old certainties, truths and beliefs have shifted, allowing individuals to experiment with their identities, sexualities and bodies. There is a plurality of opportunities to alter the body and its image: piercings, tattoos, body modification are readily available. Instead of identity being seen as something fixed and determined by social or cultural roles, it can be seen as something that can be constructed and reconstructed, leading to such questions as: What does it mean to be male? What does it mean to be female?

  And so, the period of postmodernity has led to changes in the way gender, the body and sexuality have come to be perceived, with the self being viewed as a construct continually in process. Therefore, for readers and writers of experimental fiction, it is imperative to have an understanding, as to what has contributed to these changes.

  Undoubtedly the rise of the Women’s Movement and other movements, notably Gay Pride, questioned gender assumptions. What were once constituted as gender norms has been called into question, leading to a newly fluid and unstable view of identity; this has been key to the cultural shift which marks the postmodern, a space where different voices can be heard. Where there was once a more clear definition of gender roles and gender spaces, both roles and spaces have now become blurred. More and more men are becoming homemakers, choosing to raise children, while women are taking on the role of breadwinner; therefore, concepts of gender roles have undergone a transition. In addition, with the acceleration of developments in technology and the media, advertising stereotypes of female and male have been subverted, to fall in line with these shifts, challenging the old models of male and female norms, so that men and women often see themselves through images of consumer culture. In addition, oppressive forms of femininity and maybe
to a lesser degree, masculinity, and socio-cultural definitions of desirability are no longer fixed. This has implications for the body and sexuality, including sexual practices, which in turn has impacted upon the practice of writing and reading postmodern fiction which experiments with these new representations in new ways. But how?

  Why are new representations of gender, the body and sexuality reflected in postmodern fiction?

  If writers and readers, in any era, are living through a paradigm shift, the cultural and social changes that occur become a focus of interest for a number of writers, and they experiment with these new representations in their work, so fiction can be seen to be consolidating this shift.

  Postmodern fiction reflects postmodern identities, ones that have opened up new cultural spaces within which different forms of social and sexual relationships are happening. Fluid identity is characteristic of postmodern fiction, which, as McHale argues, raises such questions as: ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’ (McHale, 1987, p. 10). And so it appears that boundaries between male and female have blurred. Social, cultural, economic and political developments have allowed for the evolution of identity, and this is reflected in literary works.

  In addition, in the postmodern world, sexuality is not fixed. The climate is one that encourages flexibility and experimentation; individuals can be gay, straight, gay again, then bisexual. As Joseph Bristow suggests:

  Bisexuality unsettles uncertainties: straight, gay, lesbian. It has affinities with all of these, and is delimited by none. It is, then, and identity, that is also not an identity, a sign of the certainty of ambiguity, the stability of instability, a category that defines and defeats categorisations. Bi thinking, then, definitely shares the postmodern emphasis on the indeterminacy of the sign. Moving across sexes, across genders, across sexualities, bi-ness warmly embraces multiple desires and identifications while repudiating all ‘monosexual’ imperatives. (Sexuality, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 225)

  Postmodern fiction, which is working outside the traditional, not only seeks to reflect the changes, it also seeks to challenge beliefs and to stimulate new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing and new ways of being in the world; for example, the experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose, in her 1968 novel Between, omitted the verb ‘to be’ to stress the narrator’s disorientated sense of identity and in her 1998 fiction Next, she had twenty-six narrators, whose names began with a different letter of the alphabet. In this fiction, she omitted the verb ‘to have’ to emphasis the loss of identity the homeless Londoners experience in the book. But who else is writing about identity and how are they doing it?

  Which postmodern writers have experimented with identity, the body and sexuality in their work, and how?

  Kathy Acker, an American, bisexual, experimental novelist and cult figure of the punk movement, was strongly influenced by William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, the Black Mountain School, the Fluxus Movement and literary theory, especially French feminism. She was a writer who experimented with identity, sexuality, the body, violence, desire and pleasure in her fiction, claiming her novels were also influenced by her experience as a stripper.

  In her writing, Acker, in an eclectic fashion, recycles and combines plagiarism, cup-up technique, pastiche, autobiography, pornography, French feminism, philosophy and literary theory, and in so doing, she blurs the distinction between popular and high art and obliterates literary hierarchies. By embracing a multiplicity of discourses, and references to other texts, Acker destabilizes and fragments her fiction in order to portray the instability of female identity. By employing this process, she confounds expectations of what fiction can be. Also, she illustrates that

  Feminism is an essential part of postmodernism … one of the traits of postmodernism is decanonization of all master codes, all conventions, institutions, authorities. Likewise this ‘decanonization is what feminism is all about, for feminist texts deconstruct women’s oppression and displace the centre of attention away from men … feminist texts often abandon plot and causality, dislocating organization, disrupting syntax, exploiting word play and intertextuality. (Smyth, Edmund, Postmodernism & Contemporary Fiction, p. 156)

  * * *

  Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Identity and Sexuality Using Multiple Discourses

  Write a short story by assembling a bricolage of multiple discourses, for example, literary theory, pastiche and parody; use puns and disrupt syntax too. Use this as a starting point: I became someone else for a night and a day …

  * * *

  Some see Kathy Acker’s work as a form to be contested because of her manipulation of texts, in which she blurs the boundaries of creativity and plagiarism; for example, in 1982, she rewrote Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. She also borrowed the work of Marcel Proust and Marquis de Sade. Some critics refer to her as a literary terrorist; others view her explicit manipulation of existing literary works as being very skilful. There is also a mixed response to the content of writing, some seeing it as exposing sexual domination as a form of oppression, others seeing it as the objectifying of women.

  In her work Don Quixote, Don is a young woman engaging with poststructuralist theory, wandering the streets of New York and St. Petersburg having had a meltdown, following an abortion. She recognizes the world’s frauds, fakes and lies and regards identity as an internalized fictional construct. Memoriam to Identity is steeped in French philosophy and literary theory and engages with questions of identity, violence, authorship and the body.

  * * *

  Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with New Ways of Viewing the Body by Using Different Points of View

  Write a section from a novel in which a character either

  Celebrates one’s body

  Reconstructs one’s body

  Transcends one’s body

  Has one’s body tattooed

  Has one’s body pierced

  * * *

  Jeanette Winterson also explores identity, the body and sexuality in her fiction; it is concerned with a collision of discourses, especially the language of fairy tales. The fact that fairy tales are rich with symbols, metaphors and binaries, and also that they are formulaic, means that Winterson is able to play with their codes and conventions. Well-known plot structures can be re-arranged. It is also possible to free characters from their traditional contexts and place them in new ones, or manipulate and challenge the boundaries of time and space; doing these things can be liberating for a writer, and fun for the reader.

  Winterson produces works which are an exploration of certain postmodernist ideas through an overlapping set of narratives, stories within stories, which deny the conventional presumption of a linear form in narrative. Instead, the narratives collapse, fictively, into one another, and cross the boundaries between history and fiction, realism and fairy tale. This blending of styles and blurring of boundaries, to produce an effect of pastiche, is predominant in Sexing the Cherry. Winterson uses alternative authoritative narrative in The Story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. A mini narrative within Sexing the Cherry shows a princess falling in love with a woman, not a man. Also, all the princesses within Winterson’s narrative reject marriage, preferring to live in exclusively female communities, and so they eradicate their husbands. She also explores lesbian desire; one of the princesses falls in love with a woman. ‘I wanted to run my finger from the cleft in her chin down the slope of her breasts and across the level plains of her stomach to where I knew she would be wet’ (p. 54).

  Winterson subverts patriarchal truths and explores new representations of identity within her fiction. Dog-Woman, in Sexing the Cherry, is a grotesque figure whose size is intimidating to men. Indeed, she bites off their penises. Sexing the Cherry is a novel which problematizes language in relation to identity. Winterson uses the male character, Jordan, to convey that ‘Language always betrays us’. He claims that it ‘tells the truth when we want to lie’ (Winterson, 1989, p. 90).
Jordan also articulates gender difference and how this is reflected through language. ‘I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of me but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other’ (p. 31). By referring to women’s ‘private language’, Winterson illustrates the fact that language shifts according to situations or identities which can be assumed. Jordan discovers women’s language by becoming a woman and having access to women’s spaces.

  Patriarchal values have been subverted within Sexing the Cherry. Winterson does this by rewriting old narratives and making them new. She rewrites fairy tales, in particular The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Although in the rewriting all the princesses reject marriage:

  We had been married a few years when a man came to the door selling brushes … I asked him what he had in his other bag, the one he hadn’t opened.