Experimental Literature

By Emma Nash
jazzclub

Generally speaking, I favor what’s conventional. I’m the type who prefers paintings be of traditional landscapes, hunting dogs, or horses, and finds that anything more avant-garde than Picasso is best viewed in a museum. Therefore, it can come as little surprise to the reader that I was wary of Experimental Literature when I first began studying it. My initial instinct was to consign Experimental Writing to the same place I had avant-garde artwork. That is, I thought it might be worthwhile for study in academic settings, but had no place in practical or everyday use. Basically, when I thought of “experimental” literature, I pictured gaunt, turtleneck-clad figures lurking in dank coffee shops and jazz clubs, taking drags from quellazaires and cultivating their ennui. I never imagined it could grace the bedside tables of working mothers or the beach bags of vacationing grandfathers. To use an obvious and perhaps extreme comparison, your average suburban family wouldn’t have Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” in its living room.

Of course, my conception of Experimental Literature resulted largely from ignorance of the genre (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad not only received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011, but also enjoyed a high degree of commercial success). When I began my capstone course on “Hybrid Texts,” I quickly and happily discovered the wide variety of experimental work that was simultaneously thought provoking and conventionally entertaining.

For example, consider M.K. Asante’s memoir Buck, which includes a free hip-hop soundtrack to accompany the book. The soundtrack adds meaning to Buck’s story, and readers’ experience wouldn’t be the same without it (in an interview with allhiphop.com, Talib Kweli, who partnered with Asante to create the album, noted that it allowed the viewer to enter the world portrayed in Buck). However, the book still stands alone without the accompanying soundtrack, dealing poignantly with difficult issues in a concrete and approachable way, such that the reader need not be an expert on hip-hop to appreciate the story portrayed.

mausConsider also Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Maus is Spiegelman’s retelling of his father’s memory of the Holocaust. Importantly, it is a comic book, and as such differs vastly from traditional literature. However, unlike what I’d imagined of experimental literature, rather than alienating its audience through excessively cerebral and ostentatious devices, Maus’s form allows greater access to the emotion and horror associated with an impossibly awful story. For instance, Maus depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The metaphor is simple, but the implications are profound: readers better apprehend the helpless fear the Jews felt of the Nazis who hunted them.

Asante and Spiegelman certainly made use of experimental writing in ways that deepen every reader’s understanding of their books. In these instances, experimental writing is helpful to the lay reader. However, what do we do about those pieces of experimental literature that are not immediately accessible to readers, particularly those outside of academic settings? Anne Carson’s Nox is a beautiful and fascinating elegiac remembrance of her older brother Michael, written around the framework of Catullus’ 101, an ancient Latin elegy honoring that poet’s brother. Nox is highly experimental (it’s compiled like a scrapbook, the pages covered in ephemera from the author’s life). Fully understanding Nox requires that the reader have extensive knowledge about the Latin language and the study of Classical languages and culture. What’s more, even a cursory apprehension of the book requires some outside knowledge or research (i.e. knowing that Catullus’ 101 is about the poet’s brother). This kind of book demands that its audience engage with more than just the textual story, and is therefore inaccessible to the casual reader. What’s more, Nox’s sticker price ($30 on Amazon after a price cut from the original $42) might be discouraging to “casual” readers. This being the case, I wonder where Nox belongs. Does it require too much effort to belong in the popular canon? Are there books that belong only in academia? Or is it unfair of us to limit its sphere just because it requires greater engagement on the reader’s part?nox

These questions raise others: If some books are best studied in academia, what is the cutoff? Is it a spectrum? Is there a point at which a book becomes such a hassle that it no longer counts as entertainment? Is there a point at which innovation becomes so cumbersome as to make it impractical?

What do you think? When does innovation lose its value? Do books like Spiegelman’s Maus belong in the same curriculum as those like Night by Elie Wiesel?