On a cloudy Saturday in Notre Dame, Indiana, as the new US supreme court justice is being sworn in, consecrated with arcane ritual language, I am at the &Now festival of experimental writing. Started 15 years ago by cult novelist Steve Tomasula, the event has become perhaps the anglosphere’s major, if not only, celebration of the literary avant garde. Over the course of a weekend in &Now’s literary funhouse, the virus of language is purposefully mutated into deviant strains, from narratives told as a series of Facebook pages and art exhibitions imagined as novels, to music videos reconstituted as socio-cultural commentaries. There is a premium on innovation that makes this event feel closer to a festival of the visual arts than one of writing.
Quick GuideSix experimental novels from the US that you should try
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Dan by Joanna Ruocco
A meandering and hilarious feminist fable about a confused heroine, Melba Zuzzo, who finds herself the object of a conspiracy of criticism by the male-dominated small town in which she lives. Accused of everything from impersonating the dead to being hairy, she decides to leave.
The Book of Portraiture by Steve Tomasula
A postmodern epic told in writing and images about humanity's irrepressible urge to picture ourselves. Five interlocking chapters connect characters across continents, from the ancient world to the Renaissance and the 21st century.
Dreamlives of Debis by Lance Olsen
A highly experimental retelling of the minotaur myth, with the monster recast as a diminutive blind girl in a labyrinth who can channel voices from Icarus to Edward Snowden. Structurally the book’s numberless pages of text squares amid white space mimics a labyrinth, making it easy to get lost, and reflecting Olsen’s interest in the reading process.
Glossolalia by Tantra Bensko
Glossolalia is the unnervingly surreal story of girl detective fan Nancy, who finds herself enmeshed in a conspiracy involving a sinister organisation called Agents of the Never Mind. The novel riffs on mind control, multiple identities, dimensions, environmental desecration and transcendental states.
Drain by Davis Schneiderman
A Ballard-esque meditation on environmental catastrophe in a post-apocalyptic Lake Michigan, and a showcase for Scheiderman’s transgressive approach to language.
Green Lights by Kyle Muntz
A highly original novella of suburbia transformed, which explores a small town neighbourhood through the prism of a changing light spectrum that is somehow linked to a mutating reality.
The diversity here goes beyond form. Experimental fiction was once defined by white male gunslingers such as William Burroughs (whose legend grew after he accidentally shot his wife), and cryptic geniuses such as Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon. Now, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the authors being celebrated as experimental are both more diverse and politically engaged, using language as a vehicle to explore different identities.
“This question of being alert to language and the manipulation of writing has a great deal of heat right now,” says Douglas Kearney, an award-winning poet whose invented language samples – among other things – R&B, hip-hop, other poets and household appliances to propel performances of unsettling sonic virtuosity, and critique the appropriation of black culture. “Most experimental writing starts with a dissatisfaction with the order of the world. Language at the moment is contentious because there are so many ways for us to access each other’s language.”
Inclusion and diversity in fiction is hardly an exclusive concern for experimental writers, but their approaches are distinguished by their foregrounding of the role of language, a reckoning of how it shapes our perception of reality. For many writers of colour, LGBTI authors and others marginalised by standard language’s codifications, experimental strategies can offer new freedom to challenge social norms.
With &Now falling in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh supreme court hearings, the influence of #MeToo and the contentiousness of language was reflected by many participants: from Anna Maria Hong’s H&G, a retelling of Hansel and Gretel that sees the latter portrayed as a heroic survivor of trauma, to Marream Krollos’s Big City, a narrative meditation on cities and embodiment. Joanna Ruocco, a member of the FC2 experimental writing collective that published Krollos, says the #MeToo moment has compelled experimental writing communities to confront “the radical non-separateness of the creative sphere” from other domains of culture confounded by racism and sexism. “When writers challenge transcendence and project, in place of universals, various urgent particulars, there’s a recentring that happens. And the world and the text look different.”
Just what role language plays in the construction of identity is arguably the question that unites contemporary experimental writers with their canonic predecessors, including Burroughs and Beckett. Whether the term avant garde remains a useful one in 2018 is up for debate. Opinions on this were divided at &Now, but there was a shared belief that the urgency of our moment demands bold and persistent innovation. There was an underlying disquiet, however, that in the age of fake news and lies, the political right has appropriated the forms of postmodernism; disingenuously blurring the line between fiction and reality, to the point that naturally subversive writers are left in the uncomfortable position of arguing for a more stable, straightforward approach to language.
What, then, is the connection between challenging social norms and pushing the boundaries of language? Can you have one without the other? I put this question to Lance Olsen, a experimental novelist whose 2017 book Dreamlives of Debris is an ambitious retelling of the minotaur myth that reimagines the labyrinth as a seductive metaphor for our inability to find boundaries. For Olsen, writers of the left should resist the chimera of trying to stabilise language, which “is forever trying to represent reality, but can’t”. Instead, he says, experimental writing should serve to show how language has been continuously subject to power’s distortions, “troubled by the Trumps of the world”.
Rather than obsess over what is experimental writing and what isn’t, perhaps we should simply value the process of creating it, its ability to cultivate a deeper understanding about how language works, its uses – and abuses.
Harvey Thomlinson is the author of The Strike, an experimental syntax novel. He also translates Chinese novels.