Introduction to Focus: Experimental Writing

Experimental writing sometimes gets a bad rap. Indeed, in the words of one of our contributors, it invokes “A litany of insults.”

Is it because it is often put in the same category as “failed” writing? Or is it because of the demands it places on its readers and critics? Or is it something else?

Even among those whose work clearly fits the phrase “experimental writing,” there is some resistance in embracing it.

Our friend, the late Raymond Federman, would cringe every time his work was described as “experimental.” But when pressed to actually dub it with a general term, Federman realized that nothing better described the type of writing he championed.

Experimental writing is not the kind of thing that you find plainly labeled in a bookstore. It is largely a designation by writers for writers.

While it’s true that some experiments in writing fail, so too do some succeed. Separating the failures from the successes though is no different from distinguishing the good, the bad, and the ugly in every other type of writing.

The contributors to this focus include some of the most respected experimental writers in the world.

And none of them cringes when their work is described as “experimental writing.”

Each embraces the phrase in this focus and aims to help us to distance it from the unfair assumptions of its naysayers. We not only learn many interesting things about its state and position in the world of contemporary writing, but also see that it is a much more heterogeneous field than one might assume.

But this is not to say that this focus has been clear sailing from idea to execution.

The topic that we proposed to the participants in this issue was “Experimental Writing, Then and Now.”

As it turned out, people chose to reflect far more closely on the “now” than on the “then”—which is in itself highly encouraging to those like us who care about experimental writing as a living, enduring cultural form.

The essays in this focus represent an extreme diversity of approaches to experimental writing.

The pieces contributed by those who are primarily creative writers suggest that literary experimentalism can be conceived on a very broad horizon—as broad, undoubtedly, as the horizon on which it is practiced.

The essays provided by people who are principally academics likewise adopt very different perspectives on the matter, each one invoking a different central term (“theory,” for instance, or “reading” or “criticism”) and deploying it as a heuristic.

Just like the insistence on the “now,” that multiplicity of approach is clearly reassuring insofar as the vitality of experimentalism is concerned.

More than anything else, the essays in this issue offer a vision of experimental writing as a mosaic, wherein different tiles interrogate each other, even as they collaborate in the formation of a coherent image.

A mosaic moreover in which the interstices between the tiles are as eloquent as the tiles themselves, suggesting that any image is necessarily interrupted, and that such interruption (as Maurice Blanchot reminds us) in fact enables continuity of understanding.

It might be argued that experimental writing is like any cultural phenomenon in our time—only more so. That is, the problems that vex our culture are magnified and exaggerated for rhetorical and polemical effect in experimental writing; aesthetic gestures are never innocent, but are instead always overdetermined and at least double; the reflexive nature of art is constantly underscored and underscored again; process issues are put on display and thematized; writers cultivate, cajole, inveigle, tyrannize, lionize, and seduce their readers, turn and turn about (and sometimes in the very same breath).

Here are some of the salient vectors in that variety of approach:

In “remixthemind,” Mark Amerika argues that experimentalism in its richest form is a matter of dialogue and articulation, a collaboration between an artist and a beholder, a writer and a reader.

It is the productive tension between conceptual art and the artifact, between aesthetic theory and practice. Amerika emphasizes the importance of performance as a fundamental principle of experimentalism. He says that it is crucial to innovate, but...