(This is the final chapter of my upcoming book, Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. I do not currently have a publisher, so, tentatively, it will be available as a free ebook or pdf. More info to come.)

Splendide-Hotel

              In the early to mid-stages in Sorrentino’s career as a writer of fiction, Splendide-Hotel seemed something of an outlier among his books (so much so that some critics hesitated to identify it as a work of fiction at all). But in the last phase of his career, when he was publishing a series of short novels organized through the collage method featuring a sequence of connected vignettes, it became possible to see Splendide-Hotel as the precursor to this approach, It, too, dispenses with narrative and the development of characters in favor of self-contained prose compositions that seem disconnected but that ultimately realize their own form of unity-in-division.         

              The unity in Splendide-Hotel is manifested both structurally and thematically. The book contains 26 sections, each of them corresponding to a letter in the alphabet, and the theme that those entries each help to elaborate is indicated in the book’s title, which is taken from a line in Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations: “And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and the polar night.” Sorrentino takes Rimbaud’s image and metaphorically erects a more fully materialized site—in “S” we get a fully detailed description of the hotel:

. . .the dark-wood paneling and lemon-colored wallpaper of many of its suites, the huge crystal chandeliers of the Golden Age Room, the oiled mahogany and oak furnishings of the Men’s Saloon—all assure the guest that he is in one of the very last of the truly regal hotels Although lacking such amenities as a swimming pool and a gymnasium, the Splendide is equipped with almost anything else a guest may desire. . . .

            Sorrentino has made his Splendide-Hotel “real,” but its reality is the reality created by the artist’s imagination, the residency for which the Splendide is built. As the narrator says of a painter known for painting pictures of waiters: “they are totally unlike any waiters that anyone will ever see. And yet—and yet surely they must be the waiters employed by the Splendide. By an act of the imagination, the artist has driven through the apparent niceties of restaurant dining to reveal the bewildered rage and madness therein.” The waiters’ “irrational behavior and broken spirits do exist: in the imagination, purified against all change in the Splendide.” This notion is central to Sorrentino’s conception of the essence of literary creation and affords an appropriate rejoinder to those critics who claimed that Sorrentino paid insufficient attention to “reality”—the writer’s verbal creations are real, “willed into existence by an act of the imagination.

            Sorrentino arrived at this view of the act of creation through his extensive reading of William Carlos Williams (both the poetry and the fiction), and Williams along with Rimbaud might be seen as the de facto protagonists of Splendide-Hotel, each of them at different points invoked as “the poet.” The attention given to poets and poetry in Splendide-Hotel on the surface at least might leave the impression that it belongs to poetry (and the criticism of poetry) than to fiction—an impression that is reinforced in the Dalkey Archive edition of the book by the Afterword provided by the poet (and Sorrentino friend) Robert Creeley. Some critics have even referred to Splendide-Hotel as itself a collection of prose poems rather than a work of fiction, and while we might consider the book to be, in part, a meditation of sorts on the implications of poetic language, and there are numerous passages confirming Sorrentino’s own skills with language (such as “Y,” in which the narrator associates “love” with the color yellow), Sorrentino’s subsequent books, and especially the late works, would show that the structure and style of Splendide-Hotel continues to  inform his efforts to create alternative formal patternings in works of fiction.

            Reading Splendide-Hotel reminds us, however, that Sorrentino indeed was first of all a poet, and that all of his fiction proceeds through formal assumptions that reveal a poet’s awareness of form more than the narrative instincts of a traditional novelist. (As a poet, Sorrentino is inclined toward formalist-inspired lyric poems rather than shapeless “free verse.”) In neither his poetry or his fiction does Sorrentino conventionally “wax poetic” through the kind of lyrical figuration that often passes as “literary” writing. Love is not “like” yellow, it is inhabited by it, embodied in the arrangement of images:

. . .It may be, though, that in flailing about, the notion that yellow is love’s color appealed to my sense of design. I think of the pale sun that occasionally shines above the massive hotel: I think of Amarillo: I think of the color of the walls in that tavern where the men still sit, drinking red beer. The peeling paint of those walls, a kind of dull mustard-yellow, is close to the color I envision. Nothing spectacularly brilliant will do, The color is somehow perversely pleasing in apposition to that which it surrounds.

            But is this “I” Gilbert Sorrentino the poet, author of Splendide-Hotel, or is it an invented narrative persona, masquerading as the author and tempting us to assume he speaks for the author? On the one hand, this narrator performs the tasks a narrator conventionally undertakes, introducing characters, setting up a situation, at times even telling a brief story, but on the other he freely acknowledges that this is a role he plays, that he is, fact, making things up. In “P,” he tells us that a “painter whom I have invented has recently painted a picture which, after some deliberation, he has decided to call P. It is not a good painting, but I find myself strangely drawn to it.” This picture reminds the narrator of an old photograph that includes his grandparents in a composition much like that of the painting. “What is strange, of course, is how this painter should have come upon his subject, notwithstanding his butchery of it.” This does not seem strange to any reader who did simply pass over the narrator’s declaration that the painter is invented: the painter came upon his subject because the author/narrator contrived the situation in which the mysterious coincidence supposedly occurred.

            Mysteries in fiction are always contrived, as are plots, settings, and the idea of character development, and Sorrentino’s fiction, at least after Steelwork, makes no pretense to concealing its own contrivances. Along with perhaps John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino may arguably be the most purposefully self-reflexive writers in postwar American fiction. Any serious consideration of the phenomenon of metafiction as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s would have to give a exprominent place to Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew, and Splendide-Hotel continues the practice established in Imaginative Qualities of directly acknowledging the presence of the author (or at least that authorial persona) engaged in bringing the work we are reading into being. (Mulligan Stew relies less directly on this kind of direct discursive gesture in calling attention to its own blatant artifice.) Even though it returns us to Sorrentino’s antecedent interest in poetry, Splendide-Hotel now serves not just as an aesthetic progenitor to some of Sorrentino’s later work, but as one of the paradigmatic examples of the rule-breaking strategy that arguably became the challenge to conventional assumptions about the nature of form in fiction most closely identified with the earliest “postmodern” writers.

            If Splendide-Hotel is often enough overlooked, lurking between Imaginative Qualities and Mulligan Stew in the confirmation of Sorrentino’s gifts as a writer of experimental fiction and immediately followed by a last resurgence of activity as a poet (three volumes in 1976, 77, and 78), it nevertheless affords a reader of Sorrentino’s work a worthwhile reminder that it all arises from the poet’s enhance awareness of language—the alphabetical structure of Splendide-Hotel directs us to the very source of language, and Sorrentino’s fiction never really lets us stray far from it. There are no Sorrentino novels that invite us to look past the words on the page, as the shaper of form, and contemplate instead the illusionistic space occupied by “real people” caught up in the story being told about them. Sorrentino is more interested in the total effect his verbal arrangements might have on the attentive reader than in conjuring such an illusion.

            Sorrentino certainly paid a price for maintaining this aesthetic throughout his career. After the semi-success of Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino conceivably could have enlisted his genuine comedic skills in further “rollicking” comic novels or postmodern Menippean satires, or transmuted his Bay Ridge past into more straightforwardly autobiographical narratives rendering the old neighborhood—books that might have sustained or even increased the commercial value of his fiction. He did not do that, of course, the partial feint toward commercial appeal of Aberration of Starlight notwithstanding, if anything further reducing the commercial viability of his novels with every new release. Perhaps there were those who thought Sorrentino thus showed at the least some impatience with conventional reading habits (if not outright contempt for them), but his disdain for mainstream literary culture was more often directed neither at readers nor critics, but at publishers whose notions of quality in books were pretentiously middlebrow and unshakably commercial.

            Sorrentino’s list of rejections from such publications was prodigious. Luckily, all of the works Sorrentino wanted to publish did find homes with one or another of the myriad independent presses that help to get adventurous fiction into print. (Dalkey Archive being among the most prominent of these.) That Gilbert Sorrentino persisted in writing his own inimitable versions of formally adventurous fiction right up to his final, fatal illness finally suggests he did believe there was and will be an audience for this work, however much the American “book business” wants to ignore it.

I have now managed to transport the contents of The Reading Experience from Typepad to Word Press. However, as in some episodes of Star Trek in which the transporter malfunctions, the blog has rematerialized in a somewhat scrambled form: I have not been able to reproduce the features of the Typepad version exactly, and thus have altered the blog’s organizing principle accordingly. Most of the posts I wanted to preserve (there were many with stale links or ephemeral content that I discarded) and the reviews (numerous of which first appeared in other venues) and longer essays have been arranged on pages to which I have linked on the sidebars. These pages present the posts that seem to me to still have resonance and/or relevance, or that I just want to preserve.

I must say I do not find Word Press to be nearly as intuitive and user-friendly as Typepad. (I sampled the AI Editor, but, like all other iterations of AI I have experienced, it is a disaster–AI is quite literally destroying civilization).Typepad made formatting and posting simple and easy, while Word Press seems to make them as cumbersome and confusing as possible–so cumbersome that I am now not at all sure when, or even if, I will continue posting on this blog. Perhaps I will get used to the needlessly byzantine processes here, but it could be that, at least for me, the era of blogging is finally over. Alas: Why is it we can never have nice things?

Wayne Booth’s scholarly apologia on behalf of “ethical criticism” in his 1988 book, The Company We Keep (still the most well-known defense of such criticism written by a modern academic critic), is not a plea for the upholding of “morality” in literature—or so, at least, does Booth want to assure us:

The word “ethical” may mistakenly suggest a project concentrating on quite limited moral standards: of honesty, perhaps, or of decency or tolerance. I am interest in a much broader topic, the entire range of effects on the “character” or the “person” or the “self.” “Moral” judgments are only a small part of it.

Indeed, Booth believes that ethical criticism rigorously and conscientiously carried out is the best way to ward off the censors. By taking seriously the notion that works of literature have actual, palpable effects on readers’ perception of themselves and of the real world they inhabit outside the text, critics will avoid being “trapped” inside unacknowledged critical pieties that only ensure that the battle against censorship will be lost.

However, if “moral judgment” is only a small part of ethical criticism, it is nevertheless still a part. And it does not seem altogether impudent to ask: What really is the point of ethical criticism, define it however broadly you want, if the ultimate objective is not to arrive at a moral judgment? This judgment might be restricted to the individual reader, with no attempt to persuade others to share it, but the impulse to communicate one’s disapproval of a literary work’s moral assumptions or applications is surely a strong one in many people, especially among certain kinds of censorious literary critics. Although it is not Booth’s goal to assist such critics in turning their private moral judgments into socially enforced censorship, the very notion of “ethical” criticism seems to me inherently censorious: The Company We Keep is full of moral judgments about particular works that Booth has come to esteem or disesteem (often having changed his mind from the former to the latter), and while his discussions of these works are often elaborate but never less than thoughtful, I don’t see how they can avoid having an effect that is at least a kind of unofficial condemnation, censuring rather than censoring. Booth may not have directly wanted to discourage us from reading Rabelais because of the moral imperfection of Gargantua and Pantagruel (sexism), but this is inescapably its secondary effect.

Of course, critics discourage readers from taking up a literary work whey they accuse it of aesthetic imperfections as well, but in this case it is being judged by the standard appropriate to them: works of fiction and poetry solicit judgment as literary art, and to assess them as more or less successful is the chief function of criticism (certainly of book reviews). Aesthetic judgment need not be the only or final goal of criticism, but ethical criticism is not merely the analysis of literature in its historical, political, or cultural context. It purports to render a conclusion about the quality of literary work, in effect competing with aesthetic judgment as an arbiter of literary value. However, it is difficult to understand how ethical or moral concerns are, in fact, properly regarded as “literary” values at all. To emphasize the ethical qualities of a work of literature is to be preoccupied with ethics (in the form of morality or a branch of philosophy), not with literature per se,  and criticism becomes merely the vehicle for abstract thinking about “values” in general.

It could fairly be said that many of the “great works” assigned to the literary canon were given that status because they were perceived to be the source of ethical and moral wisdom, or because they dramatized compelling ethical dilemmas. Indeed, works of literature written before the modern era may have been regarded by their audiences as at least partly a prompt for ethical reflection. I would argue, however, that to the extent these works continue to resonate for modern readers they do so as a result of their continuing aesthetic power, not mainly for their moral messages (often religious), which in many cases no longer attracts our attention (I, for one, have this reaction to Paradise Lost.) But, even granting that works of the more or less distant past were presumed to convey moral lessons, fiction (the dominant object of Booth’s ethical scrutiny) steadily developed into a literary form that increasingly discounted moral content in favor of aesthetic complexity (especially in the 20^th century). Booth himself implicitly acknowledges this through his various efforts (most famously in The Rhetoric of Fiction but also in The Rhetoric of Irony, as well as The Company We Keep) to demonstrate that the putative “autonomy” of the text in modern fiction and criticism—polysemous and ironic all the way down—is an illusion, critical dogma, a misreading of the way fiction actually works, Rhetoric is unavoidable and no narrative can be completely ironic. A text that can’t be interpreted can’t be read; “meaning” may vary among different readers, but that doesn’t mean it is nonexistent.

Both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Rhetoric of Irony are impressive feats of close reading that in effect try to use the kind of close reading advocated by the New Critics against the New Critics’ intentions to seal off the literary text from intrusions of extra-literary kinds of of analysis (political, biographical, etc.) and thus pry open the text for readings that do indeed question its autonomy. In both books, Booth applies a careful analysis to the texts and practices he considers, and both of them still provide insights into how fiction, and the devices used in fiction, work on readers. The Rhetoric of Fiction remains a book with which serious students of fiction (including writers themselves) should still be familiar. I myself read the book as a neophyte graduate student, who found it an inspiring introduction to serious literary scholarship that revealed to me how sustained thinking about works of literature, done by a critic of Booth’s intelligence and keenness of perception, can enliven out reading of these works, not bury it in jargon and abstraction.

Yet these books ultimately cleared the way for Booth’s transformation in The Company We Keep of the insights he offered there into a manifesto of sorts that magnifies those insights well beyond merely questioning the aestheticism of modern criticism and produces instead a critical program  unambiguously elevating “meaning” above aesthetics. Literary criticism itself is essentially reduced to inspection of a literary work for its ethical correctness, its success or failure made contingent on such inspection. In this way, The Company We Keep has in retrospect become the harbinger of the profound shift of scholarly perspective that has occurred over the past 50 years, by which the academic study of literature has all but banished the aesthetic orientation against which Booth makes his case in favor of a broadly ethical approach (although ultimately the emphasis in current academic criticism is usually specifically political). Most academic critics do not now “read” literary texts as works of art but instead for their meaning, either explicit or latent, the latter of which providing what is now seen as literary analysis.

If The Company We Keep can be identified as a herald of this change in disciplinary mission—from the attempt to construe what is in the text to moving as directly as possible to what is outside it—Booth himself as a critic is still able to maneuver adeptly inside the text. His aim is no to use the literary work to prompt ethical inquiry tangential to literary value but to judge literary value by taking the work’s ethical implications seriously. The Company We Keep includes four extended close readings (as well as other, briefer readings throughout the book) that amply illustrate Booth’s skills in explication and interpretation. His analysis of Rabelais reluctantly concludes that Rabelais’s great work (a term Booth continues to use) is inextricably tainted by its sexism. He defends Jane Austen against the charge that her novels reinforce gender stereotypes in 18^th century England, showing how Austen’s portrayals of male-female interactions already contain an implicit critique of those stereotypes, while his in-depth consideration of Huckleberry Finn comes to more ambivalent conclusions about the alleged racism of Twain’s book, although Booth asserts he does still admire the novel.

The most impressive of these readings is Booth’s account of his reconsideration of the work of D.H. Lawrence (originally delivered as a keynote address to the D. H. Lawrence Society). Booth previously had a, at best, mixed reaction to Lawrence’s novels (liking Sons and Lovers, intensely disliking Lady Chatterley’s Lover), generally finding the “implied author” in them problematic. When he is persuaded to reread Lawrence, he comes to admire his fiction for its capacity to inhabit the various points of view of its characters:

Lawrence was experimenting radically with what it means to lose his own distinctive voice in the voices of his characters, especially in their inner voices. In his practice, all rules about point of view are abrogated: the borderlines between author’s voice and character’s voice are deliberately blurred, and only the criticism of whole tale will offer any sort of clarity to the reader seeking to sort out opinions.

Lawrence in effect gives over his narratives to the perspectives of his characters so that nothing any of them think or say can be attributed to Lawrence’s implied author (or Lawrence himself). Booth considers this a sort of ethical generosity on Lawrence’s part, but Booth’s analysis of how Lawrence employs point of view is also a virtuoso act of literary criticism, ethical or otherwise. His analysis does not necessarily make me more appreciative of Lawrence’s ethical stance, but it does make me better informed about how his fiction works.

The impression left by both The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep is that Booth is a critic whose first commitment is to the integrity of literature and to its illumination by criticism, but who also believes that an important measure of that integrity is a literary work’s ethical effects. But not only should the effects produced by the work be acceptable (at worst, benign, at best, virtuous.), but the reader should find its authorial presence reflected in what Booth designates in The Rhetoric of Fiction the “implied author.” Booth is the originator of this term, and his entire ethical project is essentially dependent on it for the trope that lies behind the book’s title: the reader finds (or should find) the implied author to be a “friend,” worthy of our continued attention. Booth goes into great detail about how our relationship with the implied author might approximate the qualities we value in real friendships, so it is a metaphor he takes very seriously—so seriously that he almost regards this implied author (which is itself ultimately a metaphor) as if, ideally, he/she becomes the equivalent of an actual human friend.

This is asking the metaphor to carry a great deal of rhetorical weight—too much, in my opinion. Like so much of Booth’s literary analysis, his postulate of the implied author is ultimately a reaction against the more extreme manifestations in modern criticism of formalist assertions of the independence of the literary work from the author of the work, assertions that isolate the work itself, and just the work, as the object of critical attention. We can speak only about the emergent features of the text itself, not about what the author intended, or what the author believes, or the author’s biographical circumstances. The literary text doesn’t itself “say” anything, doesn’t pronounce its meaning, but leaves the reader to determine how the text might be meaningful in the experience of reading it. Booth finds this an incomplete account of how a literary narrative actually works on us, and a misunderstanding of how most people read, and thus the implied author, who does in fact invoke rhetorical strategies to accomplish a particular effect, and whose overall presence in the reader’s perception of the way those strategies coherently interact prompts Booth to think of this presence as “company.”

If by “implied author” Booth means something like “a narrative presence fashioned by the (real) author or the sum total of the effects the work seems to produce,” then I wouldn’t really have any reservations about using the term as a way of speaking about how we experience a literary text. But Booth wants it to signify something more palpable, more closely associated with the author, even though he maintains there is a distinction between them. Ultimately, however, this seems to be a distinction without a difference: when Booth claims that Rabelais is no longer as worthy of reader’s esteem as he once might have been because of his demeaning portrayals of women, he does not mean we should direct our disapproval at the “implied” Rabelais, the writer’s stand-in, but should regard Rabelais the long-canonic historical figure who wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel less charitably (since, after all, the feelings of the “real” Rabelais hardly now seem the proper object of our concern). And simply to think less highly of that book surely doesn’t spare Rabelais as author his comeuppance. The same verdict would be passed down on, say, Dickens if here were in the dock for his perceived infractions. It is not the implied author who would serve the sentence of posterity’s disdain, but Charles Dickens as we who read him now know him (as he exists now only in our reading and discussing him).

Thus Booth’s attempt to keep work and writer separate in his ethical judgments seems just as much an artificial construct as any of those contrived by the modern critics whose overly refined ideas and theories about the interpretation of literature Booth has attempted to discredit. To find a particular work ethically unfit doesn’t necessarily entail an ethical indictment of the writer (the flesh-and-blood person who wrote the book), but it does inevitably taint that writer’s work as a whole: if the Mark Twain who wrote Huckleberry Finn, which literary history as come to designate his greatest work, authored a book that is inescapably racist, what chance that his other books happily avoid this offense? Our estimation of the literary work produced by “Mark Twain,” the name itself now the only living presence of the author available to us, can only be lowered. However much Booth would like his method of ethical criticism to remain a text-based practice and not an ad hominem stricture against the person who wrote the text, the latter is in fact the ultimate effect because it is, among the preponderance of actual readers, the only effect it can have.

The present contingent of academic critics in their efforts to make literary works serve as the vehicles for their own version of ethical criticism, have focused less directly on the moral effects of narratives, concerned instead to find in literary works those elements that affirm (or fail to affirm) a broadly progressive social or political perspective. Perhaps the most consequential difference between ethical criticism as presented in The Company We Keep and the current practice in academic criticism is that Booth’s approach is centered on the interaction between the text and an individual reader, on the reader’s “appreciation” of the work, while academic critics now concern themselves with the appreciation, not of the literary work itself, or even the reader’s possible responses to the work, but of the “issues” at stake in the representations offered in, mostly, fiction (academic critics have more or less lost the ability to interpret poetry, since it doesn’t lend itself as well to analysis that rejects aesthetics), although of their memoir/creative nonfiction sometimes also fills the bill. Booth wasn’t really attempting to inquire into ethical questions outside of their salience to particular works of literature. Today, academic critics focus above all on what is “outside.”

Yet, in suggesting in The Company We Keep that “pure” literary analysis is an illusion, that the literary critic must supplement any kind of formal analysis with a consideration of the work’s ethical ramifications, Booth would return academic literary criticism to the assessment of “content.” Since the usurpation of New Criticism as the paradigm method of academic criticism by, first of all, literary theory, content has increasingly become king. The critic uses the literary narrative to get a glimpse of material historical conditions. The critic seeks to understand the influence of culture by isolating its representations in the symbolic space of literature (along with other forms of symbolic expression). The critic interprets a literary narrative and its depictions of characters in such a way that it reinforces enlightened political values related to race, gender and sexual orientation, etc. Seldon do writers’ aesthetic achievements play a role in these efforts, although at times an underappreciated writer from an underrepresented group does receive critical treatment in order to bring that writer greater recognition in general (usually because of the way this writer reinforces those political values).

Whether Wayne Booth would find these approaches to criticism consistent with his intentions in The Company We Keep seems to me questionable, but these broad changes of approach were already underway when it was published and accelerated in the remaining decade and a half of his life. I can myself recall, at around the time this book was published and I had just completed a graduate education of the kind that may have consisted of the last vestige of the traditional literary curriculum that Booth still took for granted, that in talking to several other instructors in a cohort of us who had taken temporary jobs at a midwestern University (the move to contingent employment in academe was also already underway), many, if not most, of them obviously had different assumptions than me about what “professing literature” should be about. To them, New Criticism was a hopelessly outdated and misbegotten enterprise, enamored of “verbal icons” rather than being engaged with important new ideas or making criticism and scholarship socially relevant.

I thus began my prospective career as a literature professor already feeling old. I was not myself necessarily wedded to New Criticism as the critical method I intended to pursue, but as academic criticism became only more oriented away form an interest in literature to an interest in what other agendas it can be made to serve, I found myself increasingly defensive about the formalist approach exemplified by the New Critics (but not only by the New Critics), even though I could agree that the New Critical insistence on such terms as “autonomy” and “ambiguity” could readily enough slide into dogmatism and that the proscription against sundry “fallacies” threatened to make the method excessively methodical, a matter of following interpretive rules. That an approach that had as its goal to clarify how  a literary text works might be applied too zealously in following its rules does not, however, mean that the fundamental principle animating the approach is invalid. Formalism is arguably the mode of criticism that most completely centers the work of literature itself as the object of critical interest, and while it is certainly true that this need not be the only purpose the literary text might serve for the scholar or critic, to essentially deny it any acceptable place in academic literary study seems a profound overreaction to its alleged limitations.

It almost certainly was part of Booth’s intentions in The Company We Keep to dislodge formalism from its putatively privileged place in postwar academic criticism (although its displacement was happening even as the book was published, but just as surely he did not question the existence of the “art” in the art of fiction—what throughout The Company We Keeps he calls the “power” of literary narrative at its most accomplished, a power for which formalism at its best tries to account. Unfortunately, current academic criticism has not only banished critical formalism from its ranks of acceptable practice, but it has come to deny that literary art has any power that doesn’t derive from its capacity to reveal the material circumstances in which it was produced and thus to raise political awareness of those conditions. It does not attempt to reckon with the aesthetic practice of those writers who are implicitly acknowledged as literary artists, but assumes that the ultimate value of their work lies in raising political awareness of particular issues. Notwithstanding the significance of The Company We Keep as the portent of a major shift in direction in academic literary study, Booth as a critic would still probably seem to most readers encountering his work for the first time to be a pretty old-fashioned, literature-centric literary critic.

My own response to The Company We Keep has changed in the time since it was published. While even then I did not agree with Booth’s insistence on the urgency of ethical criticism, the book seemed to offer a perspective worth taking seriously for a formalist-inclined critic like me, exposing for reappraisal some of the inadequately thought-through assumptions about the distinction between form and content. But when content has so thoroughly overwhelmed formal analysis, and when the only writing about literature by academic critics that has a chance to be published must address narrowly-focused political topics that properly belong to disciplines and interests other than literature, my patience for a criticism that calls for foregrounding ethics has mostly been exhausted. When criticism in what was my field, postwar American fiction (which as “contemporary literature” had to claw its way into the curriculum in the first place) has been so emptied of concern for the integrity of literary writing as a distinctive practice, and when any consideration of an individual writer’s work concentrates on its ultimate social utility as political intervention (as a glance at the latest offerings at the major university presses will demonstrate), it is only reasonable to conclude that academic literary study has all but disappeared in any form its original proponents would recognize. Accuracy in advertising would require  it be renamed to better reflect its revised mission, housed in departments of cultural analysis, activist studies, or whatever other name more correctly describes what academic critics are really up to.

If Wayne Booth could not have envisioned such a development, from my own perspective it seems entirely predictable that a conception of literary study proposing we focus on what’s good for us in the books we read would inevitably lead to the sort of single-mindedly reformist criticism we are getting. Literature itself isn’t really necessary for that kind of exercise, except as a pretext for introducing the subject at hand and reinforcing the critic’s rhetorical purpose, so it is neither surprising that literature has disappeared in the academic discipline that supposedly studies it, nor will it be an irreparable loss to those of us who do value literature if the current implosion of the humanities in academe finally reaches full collapse. I have little confidence that recent efforts to return attention to literature itself (by resuscitating “judgment” or “close reading” or “pleasure”) will meet with much success, so the question will be what do we who still care do in the midst of the rubble.

I do not unequivocally reject the consideration of ethical questions in reading or interpreting works of literature. Readers value what they read in different ways, and a work that provokes ethical reflection in addition to its aesthetic appeal is no violation of the integrity of art—that integrity depends on the work possessing aesthetic appeal in the first place, not avoiding any relevance to real-world concerns. (Deliberately saying nothing would be just as preoccupied with advancing a message as the effort to “say something” in fiction). But the “ethical” critic almost unavoidably must subordinate the aesthetic to the ethical: How can we admire the art when we believe its effects to be harmful? This question has led to a pervasive mistrust of art and artists, not only in literary criticism but in cultural discourse in general. Artists must be and do good rather than make good art.

According to Elif Shafak, fiction "encourages empathy, oneness, pluralism, wisdom and understanding, especially in these awfully fractured times."

I think of all the fiction I have read and ask myself how often what I have read made me think I was accomplishing one of these goals.

Never have I actually experienced empathy, because empathy is something you feel for actual people, and there are no people in fiction at all, only words. Sometimes a work encourages me to share an illusion that people are present, but I am also unable to experience empathy with an illusion.  A work of fiction, at least a work of realistic fiction, attempts to create a representation of human experience, but even if I agree to feel empathy for a particular representation of such experience, I would only be deceiving myself if I pretended that some real act of empathy for real people has occurred.

I am not exactly sure what "oneness" is supposed to mean–I presume some sense of solidarity with my fellow humans–but again it would be extremely weird to think that in reading a work of fiction and its various representations I am experiencing oneness with anyone or anything. Reading fiction is in fact a private, isolating experience, and I am perfectly happy with that isolation if it allows me to intimately connect with a work of art. (So much for "pluralism" as well.)

It is possible that my many years of reading fiction has produced wisdom in me, but this would be wisdom about how to read fiction with more satisfaction and pleasure. If I am supposed to be an example of how fiction has made someone a "wise" person outside of this special context, God help us all.

I assume wisdom is associated with "understanding." Here I can't say that reading fiction has helped me to understand it better, because each work of fiction actually makes different demands on my ability to comprehend what I am reading. If it doesn't do this, if it's easy to understand, that's because it's just a repeat of other works I have read, and this is isn't helpful to me at all. (In fact, I have probably stopped reading it, anyway.) What I can say about the best fiction I have read over what is now many, many (many) years, is that these works have helped me to understand that we will never understand why human beings are as they are and do what they do. (Now that I think of it, if this is actually wisdom, maybe I am wise, after all.)

Maybe I am just a bad person. I know that many other smart and well-meaning people believe that fiction exists to accomplish all of these virtuous tasks (and I guess have made them virtuous), but they all seem to me to transform fiction into bathos and hokum. For some reason, I have a deep-seated aversion to hokum.

 

For American readers, in considering the development of "experimental" fiction during the 1960s and after, we are most likely to focus mainly on American writers- the postmodernists and their successors (the latter probably less well-known than the first generation of postmodernists such as John Barth or Robert Coover.)  In this domain of English-language fiction, British writers have been less dominant, with fewer "name" writers or specific groups inclined to develop experimental forms or challenge stylistic norms, to the point that many readers (and critics) no doubt assume that postwar British fiction did not really produce a notable contingent of experimental writers of fiction. 

Joe Darlington's The Experimentalists (2022) informs us that the view that British fiction ought not to encompass such a practice was (and likely still is) an article of belief within British literary culture itself. The Experimentalists unequivocally confirms the existence in 1960s England of not just a few barmy writers dabbling in experimentation here and there but a quite cohesive group of writers seriously committed to experimental writing who recognized each other as fellow travelers on the experimental path and, for a few years, at least, established a network of reinforcement that attempted to instill some respect for experimental writing in the staid confines of a stuffy literary culture. But the resistance was considerable. In that literary culture in the early 1960s, "many readers and writers had sourced on literary experiment and sought a return to Victorian values" Indeed, "writers like C..P. Snow, Angus Wilson, and Kingsley Amis trod a path that. . .would later [be] describe{d} as 'neo-Victorian,' novels about moral conflicts, usually involving an institution of the establishment such as universities and government departments." Experimentalism was "decadent" and un-British.

This situation was especially frustrating to B.S. Johnson, probably the best-known of the British experimentalists. (Darlington also includes lengthy discussions of Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter, although neither of them were really part of the self-identified group of experimental writers, for whom Johnson, as well as, perhaps, Ann Quin, stand as the representative figures.) If there was a revolutionary voice among the group, ready to defend the cause to the unconverted, it was Johnson, which, as a result, gave him a reputation for being strident and, at times, unpleasant, even to his ostensible friends and allies. Johnson was also arguably the most financially successful of the experimentalists, although Quin's Berg (1964) also did quite well, even though his experiments were probably the most audacious–in particular, his infamous The Unfortunates (1969), the "book in a box," consisting of separately bound sections which can be shuffled in any order the reader wishes. The failure of the experimental movement to extend itself much beyond the early 1970s strongly contributed to Johnson's suicide in 1973, which unfortunately kept his published legacy fairly small: six published novels during his lifetime, plus one posthumous novel, as well as some poems and nonfiction.

Johnson's suicide, of course, followed shortly on that of Ann Quin, whose experimental ambitions were perhaps as bold as Johnson's but whose mental fragility ultimately prevented her from fully realizing those ambitions (four published novels, plus a posthumous book containing a novella and some stories (see my review of the latter). Her Berg may have been the first novel to really call public attention to the rise of a new experimental novel in the U.K., but she was never really able to follow it up with work that was equally successful, either commercially or critically. Her story as cumulatively told by Darlington is a pretty sad one. Although the nature of her mental illness seems never to have been quite diagnosed, she lived a life marked by periods of restless exploration followed by a collapse into confusion and uncertainty Her work may have been the attempt to integrate her psychological experience in a way that avoided conventional expression but that achieved its own artistic order nonetheless. Both the formal devices she employed and many of her characters seek a more adequate means of organizing an unstable reality.

Darlington's account includes numerous other writers either loosely or more directly allied with an emergent movement of which Johnson and Quin are the most visible representatives. Among them are Brigid Brophy, Alan Burns (a close friend of Quin's and author of The Angry Brigade), Giles Gordon, and Maureen Duffy. (Most of these writers are also discussed in Francis Booth's Amongst Those Left: The Experimental Novel 1940-1980, published in 2012. Booth's book is much longer and more discursive than Darlington's, but it also features such writers as Anna Kavan, Nicholas Mosley, and Rosalind Belben, all of whose work surely has some salience to postwar British experimentalism.) Darlington also devotes substantial attention to Eva Figes and Christine Brooke-Rose, the latter of whom surely belongs on any list of important 20th century experimental writers in any language. These discussions of  writers such as Figes and Brooke-Rose (and obviously Quin) underline the centrality of women writers to the British experimental movement of the 1960s, a phenomenon that significantly contrasts with the postmodern episode in American fiction during the same period. Almost all of the major figures associated with the initial wave of postmodernists were male, although in their immediate wake (70s and 80s), notable women experimental writers certainly did begin to assert themselves. Women seem to have been at forefront of literary experiment in the U.K., and most of them saw their commitment to experiment in fiction as closely connected to their noncomformity as feminists.

In general, the British experimentalists saw their unconventional fiction as a manifestation of their broadly radical politics much more directly than the American postmodernists did. This is a conceptual difference that continues to characterize approaches to experimental fiction. For those, like many of the British writers, the disruptiveness to established practice represented by experiment in the literary work is analogous to the disruptiveness of dissenting political views. And while there were politically-charged fictions offered by the American writers (Coover's The Public Burning, for example), for the most part American experimental fiction in the 1960s and 70s devoted its ambitions primarily to challenging the hegemony of unexamined literary conventions per se. This distinction between what might be called the aesthetic mode and the political mode doesn't necessarily imply a difference in quality or scale of experiment, although it does suggest a divergence of motive in the pursuit of experimental goals. Perhaps the main reason the British experimental movement faded from public view after the early 1970s (aside from the loss of Quin and Johnson, which was admittedly crushing) is that, once the topical concerns and political causes many of these writers embraced began to seem dated, so did their work.

However, it is also the case that the American postmodern movement crested at about the same time, although arguably the American writers had more successors who continued to write adventurous fiction that followed the model the first-wave postmodernists established. There are certainly current British writers writing unconventional fiction (Ansgar Allen Paul Griffiths, the writers published by Grand Iota press), but, along with the admirable service the books by Booth and Darlinger provide by highlighting these writers and this period in British fiction, they also remind us that the attention that was given to experimental fiction in the postwar era was short-lived, and British fiction since then has not really been a notable source of experimental writing. Of course, we are also currently in a period in which mainstream literary culture is arguably less hospitable to experimental fiction than it has been in a century.

The Experimentalists is a well-written and informed book that chooses to tell a story about British experimental fiction briskly organized through narrative. For this reason, it should serve as a very effective introduction to readers less familiar with the writers and the movement it chronicles. For those already familiar with some of the figures included, it illuminates the cultural context in which the movement rose and fell and clarifies the relationships among the various writers in a way that confirms that they did share a collective ambition to revitalize literature by developing new literary techniques during what they perceived to be a period of stagnation in British literature. But the story Darlington tells is inescapably elegiac, as a group of gifted writers with admirable intentions are ultimately defeated (as a group, at least) by an indifferent literary establishment, but also their own human weaknesses.

It is hard to imagine that many readers of John Trefry's massive novel, Massive, would attempt to read every word in the book (There really are neither sentences nor paragraphs to "read" in the conventional sense, so it finally is a question of registering each word before moving to the next, assuming some sort of sequential relationship between them.) It doesn't take long to realize that the deviations and discontinuities we encounter in negotiating the text of Massive will make arriving at the "sense" of the words in any linear order both time-consuming and ultimately fruitless. One might continue to scan the pages for the occasional burst of syntactic coherence or the repetition of certain names and subjects (as I did), but finally even the notion that we are "reading" the text doesn't seem quite an accurate description of the experience. 

But nor is it entirely clear that Trefry expects us to read his book in the usual way. The text is nor formatted as conventional prose but is presented in columns (three per page) and, while there is associational overlap among the three columns by which we are invited to read across them, each column essentially develops on its own, although such development is fitful and often interrupted. Occasionally the text is merely strings of names and other words that, absent any consistent narrative or discursive context, convey no meaning beyond their manifestation on the page. These deliberate subversions of the continuity of thought and expression we usually expect the writer's prose to exhibit might be taken as a direct challenge to conventional reading habits, implying a call for a different kind of reading, but Massive seems rather to erect a barricade to the normal act of reading altogether as part of its formal/rhetorical design. 

Amidst the work's seeming structural chaos, more coherent references to characters and situations intermittently emerge, apparently related to the circumstances and fate of the modern Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, whose persecution at the hands of Stalin is evoked in irregularly appearing passages drawing on his experiences (as well as those of his wife, Nadia, and fellow poet Anna Akhmatova), substituting for the Soviet Union a fictional state identified as the ADA. These passages could hardly be said to constitute a "story," but they do allow for a minimal representation of what the book is "about," further allowing us to speculate that other of the book's ostensible subjects might be connected to this larger one, even if such connections remain oblique. We might be further led to perceive a more palpable aesthetic order in Trefry's additional manipulation of the text's typography through alteration of font types, so that the different font types might be aligned with a particular perspective or character (Mandelstam, Akhmatova), but this device is not really carried through clearly and consistently, or at least in a way that readers less familiar with the lives of the Russian writers and other cultural figures whose lives are invoked could fully appreciate.

Readers at all familiar with John Trefry would know that he is an architect by profession and is also the publisher of Inside the Castle press, which publishes both his own books and other formally challenging literary works. Applying principles related to architecture seems to be a central strategy in Trefry's previous novels, Plats and Apparitions of the Living, especially the former, the text of which is "built" on the verbal plats laid out in balanced proportions on each page. The word structures assembled on these plats are both self-sufficient, not paragraphs so much as prose poems, each of which develops a set of images or perceptions, and cumulative, serving together as a more unified impression of a consciousness (perhaps more than one) registering the external environment in which it is situated. The environment is urban Los Angeles, but while we are offered a kind of representation of this urban scene, it is an obsessively subjective one, marked by the disturbance that seems to afflict this perceiving consciousness. We are presented with an architecture not of material structures but of feelings and mental awareness.

Apparitions of the Living is less overtly designed through an association with architecture, although our attention is still conspicuously drawn to page layout–some sections of the book are printed in narrow columns with wide margins, while others are expanded to the usual left/right margins but with bigger margins at the top and bottom (taking on more of the appearance of a square) and extra spacing between the lines of the text (which alternate italicized and unitalicized type.) The latter device is employed to draw a distinction between perspectives and sometimes to highlight speech, but otherwise the typographical arrangements don't seem to serve any particular formal function except to attract attention to space–and the novel does feature in its settings a notable divergence of space. Parts of it takes place in the Western desert, while the other main setting is a multilevel hotel. (Some of the desert scenes move into a motel room, providing yet another contrast with the greater dimensions of the hotel.) Perhaps we could say that the novel seeks to offer an alternative to the inherent linearity of most narrative prose by accentuating the space of the pages as available aesthetic territory for the novelist to explore (although Trefry is not the first writer to attempt this.)

Nevertheless, Apparitions of the Living does offer the reader a discernible narrative, more so than either Plats or Massive, although the events of the story often remain indistinct and the characters involved in the story enigmatic. We are introduced first to the desert landscape, where the body of a young boy lies buried in the sand. The remainder of the book essentially relates how the boy got there–apparently the victim of a kidnapping, aided and abetted by the boy's own mother, Connie. The other participants are two men, Jack and Gyre, the former of whom we meet first and whose sections of the narrative predominate most of the novel. The purpose of the kidnapping is never exactly revealed, but it is not really the point of the narrative, anyway. Most attention is given to the circumstances in and around the motel room in which the boy is held. Although surely the boy suffers, rendering that suffering is also not really the ambition of the novel. Trefry is greatly influenced by the writers associated with the French nouveau roman, and he has cited Michel Butor as the primary inspiration for Plats, while Apparitions of the Living attempts the sort of detached objectivity we find in the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the characters in Apparitions seem distant to us, their emotions concealed, it is because, while the objects of their perception are often intently scrutinized, the emotional content of those perceptions are inaccessible to us.

Still, Trefry's tentative appeal to a discernible story and at least some degree of recognizable character creation doesn't really prepare us for the radical rejection of such conventional methods (however unorthodox in their application) in Massive. Apparitions of the Living suggested that Trefry might be making an accommodation of sorts with the traditional elements of fiction that aren't really present in Plats, retaining a clear enough distance from mainstream literary fiction while making room for readers with the expectation that character creation and narrative (as well as setting) will be important features of a work of prose fiction, but Massive makes no such concessions to conventional reading habits and goes even farther than Plats in challenging the authority of these practices as the default mode of writing fiction. It is an audacious effort, to be sure, but if it has produced a work that is effectively unreadable for other than the most devoted enthusiasts of Trefry's kind of experimental text-building (few of whom are likely to read the entire book cover to cover, either), one could ask whether attempting to extend the underlying thematic and formal ideas on such a monumental scale serves those ideas most fruitfully. There are, of course, many long, dense novels that succeed through the "art of excess," but Trefry doesn't really seem to be trying to be "artful." Massive becomes massive through the invariable accretion of its textual shards. It grows, but doesn't develop.

However, this is the case only if you expect the text to develop in some perceptible way, either through linear narrative or some other suitable formal arrangement. Trefry deliberately frustrates the reader's expectation of some kind of orderly  progression, so perhaps a different sort of approach to such an intimidating text as this would result in a more satisfying experience with it. Perhaps my approach, a kind of unhurried browsing, is what is called for (ultimately I did not think I had failed to read the book carefully because the book doesn't want to be read with the usual sort of care). Or perhaps one could abandon altogether the notion that such a text can be read consecutively and instead choose passages and pages at random, or seek out passages that seem to have associative resonance, leaving the rest. One might repeat such a strategy as often as is necessary to comprehend how the text works, or, indeed, essentially repeat it endlessly. It seems pointless to ask whether either approach leads to a thorough enough reading of Massive, since a thorough reading hardly seems possible–even reading every word in the sequence in which they are presented would ultimately leave behind a maelstrom of verbal noise.

Of course, one could attempt to confront the edifice of words that is Massive through any of these means, but is any such effort more than an improvised expedient to negotiate this one particularly imposing, idiosyncratic work, to avoid being defeated by its apparent determination to remain unfathomable? Perhaps it does challenge us to be less complacent in our assumptions about what it means to "read" a work of fiction, although this is the challenge set by all truly innovative works of experimental fiction, and it might be said that Massive merely poses the challenge in an especially unequivocal way. Perhaps then Trefry wants to persuade us that genuinely "experimental" fiction pushes against the boundaries of what is considered acceptable practice in ways that might be confounding, that should be confounding. The question becomes whether what initially confounds can ultimately be more fully recognized, the boundaries reconfigured.

Not everything about Massive is difficult to assimilate. The typographical rearrangements are not really an innovation and could certainly be further adapted and extended as an aesthetically effective device. (Other novelists have done so.) What is unique to the novel is the way they have been allowed to fragment and divide its verbal substance into discursively incompatible pieces. An intrepid reader can develop strategies for sorting through these pieces, but while such dynamic reading provides a welcome challenge to the indolent reading habits encouraged by much literary fiction, the inclination to devote most of one's attention to a work as extreme in its call for such readerly fortitude as Massive must be restricted to a select few. Massive isn't quite just a curiosity, but it is hard to envisage a book that more resolutely tests the limits of creative incoherence without becoming altogether incoherent.

It might be tempting to dismiss a work like Massive as an experimental fiction so anarchic in spirit that it simply defies ordinary reading. Yet perhaps it might be most compelling as an effort to contest our ordinary conception of what it means to "read a book." If Massive can't really be read as a single unified experience, it may in fact be a book that can only be reread: after attempting Massive for the first time, by whatever method, we try it again, adopting a different method, but of course this will result, in effect, in reading a different version, even a different book. Who knows how many different books we could find in it. I'm not sure I find the subjects treated in Massive sufficiently engaging that would want to this, but it seems an intriguing conceit for an adventurous writer to pursue–many books in one. 

It has been 60 years and more since the first writers we have now come to identify as postmodernists began to make their presence known in American literary culture. The term, "postmodern," has been applied narrowly, to classify this particular group of writers, and more broadly, to name an entire "era" that is said to entail a distinctive political and philosophical orientation to knowledge and perception separating it from the "modern" assumptions that preceded it. Over the last 10 to 20 years, its application to literature has been very loose indeed, as a way of characterizing any work of fiction that breaks from convention or seems at all "experimental." In the process, the term, and more generally the concept of innovative fiction, has become less tied to the original set of writers whose work prompted the coining of the term–Coover, Barth, Barthelme, etc.– and used more simply to separate non-realist works of fiction from mainstream "literary fiction."

This broader assimilation of the postmodern as a discernible tendency in contemporary fiction has, however, entailed, perhaps paradoxically, a diminished awareness of the specific practices and identifiable achievements of the original postmodernists and their immediate successors–a loss of historical context. Thus work by writers of otherwise conventional fiction that departs even modestly from the most conservative expectations of the form is reflexively applauded for its daring and originality, even though whatever strategy or device has prompted such praise is actually at best a modification of a an already existing approach, at times just plain derivative of a move made more persuasively by an earlier, genuinely experimental writer. The notion that unconventional approaches to form or style deserve critical respect (when done well) presently seems to be a common enough assumption in most literary commentary, but this apparently is not accompanied by a recognition of the development of such strategies through the efforts of adventurous writers of the relatively recent past.

Even when some writers are ostensibly challenging conventional forms and language more radically, beyond the enhancements of realism for which many putatively experimental devices tend to be employed, these writers themselves often simply recapitulate strategies devised by writers in the previous generation of postmodernists, or, indeed, essentially reiterate an existing form created by an earlier writer. Frequently enough we can surmise that such borrowing is to some degree a tribute to the precursor, an acknowledgment that the formal strategy invoked is a compelling substitute for conventional strategies. It is not per se an invalid approach, since arguably one of the objectives of experimental fiction might be to make available alternatives to conventional storytelling that other writers might additionally develop, but again such alert distinctions are not likely to be made in a literary-media culture that discounts historical perspective and is impatient with nuanced judgments–if more adventurous fiction manages to attract any attention at all.

Although occasionally I come across a review of a new work of adventurous fiction that draws my interest, most of the time I become aware of potentially interesting adventurous/experimental books when I am offered review copies by authors, author's agent, publicist, or publisher. This is how I came to read Ben Segal's Tunnels (published by Scism Press), a work whose experimental intentions are immediately revealed when first looking inside, where we find on each page a grid of squares (nine, in rows of 3), each containing a snippet of prose, rather than a continuous prose text. A second book by an author with whom I was previously unfamiliar, Fictions, by Ashley Honeysett, did in fact become known to me through a review, in an online journal known for its focus on independent presses. This work announces in its title that it is likely to be unconventional, but one has to read it for a while before recognizing the sort of alternative strategy it is pursuing. If it announces its "experimental" intent less obviously than Tunnels, it serves just as readily to illustrate a dilemma adventurous writers can face when attempting to escape the constraints imposed by the accepted formal conventions of literary fiction.

Segal's formal device locates his book among those works generally categorized as prose fiction but that attempt to redirect the reader's attention away from "prose" as traditionally defined and toward a more expansive conception of "text" as something that exploits the material features "book" and "printed page." This approach can be seen in such works as William Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1971), as well as, most audaciously, Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It (both 1976), but the most direct expression of the goals animating the approach can be found in Federman's essay, "Surfiction–Four Propositions in the Form of an Introduction," the first entry in Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, which Federman edited and published in 1975. The future of fiction, Federman maintains, will reject "the traditional, conventional, fixed, and boring method of reading a book" linearly and consecutively in favor of "innovations in the writing itself–in the typography and topology of [the] writing." These innovations should replace "grammatical syntax with 'paginal' syntax that grants to the reader a new "freedom" that will "give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning." 

Although this is not the only kind of innovation inwhat Federman calls "surfiction"–which covers writers such as Beckett, Borges, and Calvino, as well as American postmodernists such as Barth, Barthelme, and Sukenick–it is most conspicuous in the experiments of Federman's own early fiction (as anyone who has even dipped into Double or Nothing or Take It or Leave It, their "texts" roaming the page in endless configurations and unruly fonts, knows) and is arguably the most radical of his four "propositions." The implicit appeal to visual effects in the notion of "paginal syntax" was exploited further by such successors as Steve Tomasula and Mark Danielewski (Tomasula more effectively), and various other "illuminated" novels incorporate visual elements as well. Tunnels could be said to feature a prominent visual device in its use of the grid whose divisions govern the page, although its uniform appearance on each page eventually becomes less noticeable in and of itself as a purely visual object of attention. Instead, this novel follows Federman's proposal by giving the reader a role in assembling the text, literally a "choice in the ordering of the discourse."

The novel does not offer a single narrative but rather a succession of narratives, often using the same character names but occurring at different times, although all of them have a common setting, in, or around, or associated with a complex of tunnels somewhere in the California desert. The grids thus themselves represent a metaphorical version of the tunnels, which the reader is invited to navigate according to his/her own inclination: "There is no 'correct' order of reading," we are told in a brief preface, and we are advised to approach the text in a way that "treats the space of the book as something to be explored rather than exhaustively or systematically read." The reader's discovery of the work's "topology," to again invoke Federman, finds the "space" of reading to be as meandering as the tunnels the characters inhabit, the intent being, presumably, to collapse the distinction between the "content" the novel presents and its form as thoroughly as possible, but also to assert the space of the page itself as the medium of fiction, not the organization of language into compelling prose per se.

The strategy animating Tunnels is probably closer to the method employed by Julio Cortazar in his novel Hopscotch than to the experiments in typography and illustration in Federman or Tomasula. It asserts a certain aleatoric procedure into the discursive organization of the novel, so that the reader is allowed to create a narrative structure of his/her own. For such a strategy to work, the narrative (in this case, multiple interlocking narratives) should, it would seem, have some intrinsic interest (if not necessarily the sort of interest usually attributed to traditional stories). Unfortunately the truncated narratives in Tunnels, no matter how one might order them, are not long enough to be compelling in themselves, nor are the characters given the sort of development that might make them a consistent source of the reader's concern, while the language in most of the narrative fragments distributed in the squares is predominately functional and expository, advancing the briefly  unfolding and often crisscrossing storylines without much stylistic embellishment. This leaves the governing formal mechanism and its appeal to active reading as the dominant object of the reader's attention, and the novel struggles to sustain that attention.

Eventually this narrowing of the reading experience threatens to make the novel's structural device seem too much like a gimmick rather than an attempt to adapt and extend an experimental approach to freshly conceived purposes. I believe that Segal's ambition is indeed to extend and not merely to repeat already existing strategies for challenging conventional thinking about fiction, but the realization of the strategy in Tunnels, given the length and the constricted focus of the novel does leave the reader (this reader, at least) with the impression that the "freedom" granted to order the discourse leads mostly to a repetition of a formal conceit carried out more audaciously and propounded more cogently by various predecessors. Certainly, even an effort to break convention that comes up short on originality but is clearly enough sincere is a welcome alternative to the usual run of literary fiction that settles for the currently approved practices or sacrifices aesthetic complexity in the name of "saying something." Still, if an objective of adventurous, experimental fiction is to extend the formal potential of fiction itself beyond its current confines into yet unmapped spaces of aesthetic possibility, Tunnels unfortunately doesn't quite venture that far.

Something similar could be said of Honeysett's Fictions. In this case, the writer offers a version of metafiction, literally fiction about a writer writing fiction–as it turns out, writing the book we are reading. It is tempting to regard the book also as a memoir of sorts, since the narrator does indeed seem to be the author, not a separately named "character" who is a thinly disguised version of her, but the narrative so insistently focuses on the effort to write stories that the author's identity as living person collapses into her role as writer and the distinction between life and work becomes irrelevant as well. However much we learn about the various issues in the author's life (especially the problems experienced by her sister), the emphasis is finally on the process of storytelling, understood as the struggle of one writer to produce stories that can be published and meet with the approval of readers. While most of those stories about which we are told or allowed to sample do not seem particularly experimental, the chronicle of her progress in becoming a successful writer does finally result in a book that evokes one of the most identifiable experimental strategies in American fiction of the 1960s and 70s.

But Fictions is no Lost in the Funhouse or Universal Baseball Association. The book echoes the approach modeled in such classic works of metafiction, but its ambitions are much more modest. It isn't attempting to challenge preconceptions of the required transparency of fictional narrative–but it couldn't, since that challenge was issued decades ago and has been regularly renewed in the interim–but is appropriating the gestures associated with that challenge in order to suggest the metafictional, while also endeavoring to smooth the edges of self-reflexivity as an unconventional device so it might blend into something closer to autofiction. This latter mode could actually be taken as the offspring of metafiction, but at the core of most autofiction is a mistaken assumption about the intention behind the work of such writers as Barth or Coover, or at least about the presumed message readers should take from their work.

The self-reflexivity of metafiction deliberately disrupted the inherent presumption that in approaching a work of fiction the  reader will suspend disbelief and accept the artificial reality invoked by the work for the duration of the reading experience. It made the reader aware of the artifice, as well as the implicit presence of the writer in creating it. The autofictionists for the most part seem to have interpreted this acknowledgment of the writer behind the text not as the first step in granting fiction a greater freedom in formal arrangement beyond the requirements of traditional narrative, but as a move made to focus more attention on the writer as the ultimate subject of the work. Thus autofiction's emphasis on the author's life as source of interest, often examined in great detail. While this approach often does call into question the distinction between fiction and life, it does this by playing coy with details that may indeed be untransformed autobiography but presenting them in a work still  labeled "fiction." It has become memoir for writers who would rather forego the stricter conventions of that form. 

I would still call Fictions metafiction rather than autofiction, but, while the book is not without interest and does not lack craft, the craft is applied to help forge an alternate path to realism, with just enough roaming into the discursive underbrush along the way to complicate the journey. The book reminds us occasionally of the more adventurous route once followed by its more experimental forerunners, but ultimately doesn't really want to go there. In this way, the innovations of metafiction really have become more established, available to a writer like Honeysett to achieve goals different from those that motivated the original innovators. Fictions is a lively enough account of one writer's perseverance in achieving artistic success, but its rebellion against conventional narrative is muted, evoking an avant-garde practice only as a way of being more punctilious in depicting the protagonist's concrete circumstances. Similarly, Tunnels enlists a disruptive strategy because, paradoxically, it helps to bring a kind of mimetic authenticity to the depiction of both character and setting.

As someone who tries to keep up with the the publication of new experimental fiction, I would observe that a majority of the works that appear are something like these two books, adapting existing techniques and approaches associated with postmodern or experimental fiction either for purposes that turn out to be surprisingly conventional or that simply repeat what has come before. There are certainly writers who authentically try to extend the boundaries limiting what "experimental" might mean, writers like Gabriel Blackwell, Christian TeBordo, or Evan Dara, whose formal and stylistic challenges to both conventional and pseudo-adventurous fiction are both credible and refreshing. But while these writers have their fervent admirers (me, for one), they are also writers without a high profile in mainstream literary culture. Perhaps this is the way it should be, but previous innovative writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme did arguably change literary culture, for however fleeting a time. Literary culture at present may just be impermeable to this kind of change. Literature itself may have to cling to the margins, if it survives at all.

In addition to The Reading Experience, I have also been producing a Substack publication,  Unbeaten Paths, that usually consists of multiple book reviews of “adventurous fiction” and appears every 2-3 months. Until now I have retained both of these publications as complementary endeavors, largely because the blog has been around for a long time (20 years) and still attracts some visitors, so I have been reluctant to give it up.

I have considered converting the blog to a Substack newsletter (it covers a wider range of literary subjects, whereas the newsletter form accommodates motley book reviews somewhat awkwardly and so far has garnered a limited audience). I am hesitant to do so because, again, of the blog’s longevity and because I still also think the blog form has value. On the other hand, I would like to see if I could get a broader audience than currently on Substack.

The present owner of Twitter has basically ruined it as a means to steer people to external publications (not just Substack), another reason to move wholly to the newsletter format. I may indeed convert TRE to newsletter form, while keeping the blog and continuing to post here as well. I may go over completely to newsletter. Things could stay the same, but this is the choice that likely produces maximum frustration. The decline of blogs, the growing degradation of social media as a method of engagement, and the uncertainty that still obtains with a medium such as Substack, as well as the drying-up of outside online and print venues open to reviews and literary criticism (at least for me) have seemingly converged to make the prospects for the kind of criticism I write wobbly indeed.