What Is Experimental Literature?

That's the question recently asked by Danielle Dutton on HTML Giant.

From the piece...

Experimental writing, as a category or concept, seems fraught with widespread confusion and misunderstanding. How exactly would you describe “experimental writing”? Or, to borrow a question from Kate Sutherland, “What’s Experimental about Experimental Writing?”

Last night on the phone my dad and I were talking about fundamentalisms and the possible future explosion of the planet. He was saying how important it is do be able to dwell in doubt, to assume you don’t know it all, to embrace “the fertile void.” He said, “Certainty is for shit,” which, despite the fact that we were talking about the possible future explosion of the planet, made me feel a bit better about the fact that I really don’t know how to answer this question.

So in the spirit of uncertainty I offer Robbe-Grillet’s idea that “[a]ll writers believe they are realists. . . . each has different ideas about reality. The classicists believed that it is classical, the romantics that it is romantic, the surrealists that it is surreal. . . . Each speaks of the world as he sees it, but no one sees it in the same way.” For some reason, this was one of the first things that popped into my head when I read your question, Chris. Right or wrong, I’ve always thought of this notion as particularly sane. When I first read For a New Novel, I put a little star beside it in the margin; it made good sense to me, perhaps especially because at the same time I was studying Virginia Woolf. For Woolf, stream-of-consciousness writing—a literary experiment if ever there was one—was closer to reality on the page than realism. Of course, this isn’t how many of her readers and critics took the new style, and in fielding some of their criticisms of her work, I appreciated Robbe-Grillet’s peculiar articulation of realism, his defense of the “experimental.” Or, at least, the seemingly non-realist. The thing is, you can’t really point to something and say it’s Experimental with a capital “e.” Rather than a clearly defined category or concept, such as surrealism, “experimental” is an umbrella term under which many, many different styles of writing (and kinds of writers) can hang out (or be forced into) together. I suppose it’s generally thought that “experimental” writing is writing that experiments with (plays with, fucks with, risks) form . . . surely this means different things to different people. Mostly I think “experimental” is a watery sort of term, sweeping, more connotative than denotative, having to do with undertones, implications, context.