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  • The Literature of Extinction
  • Douglas Glover (bio)

1. Nostalgia (the Death of God)

In his essay “The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes,” Milan Kundera offers a poignant confession of allegiance to an outmoded Humanism and an aesthetic of lightness and play, which, at the outset of the Modern Era, already suggested every human possibility except, perhaps, the possibility that we might cease to be. I say outmoded, but Kundera himself recognizes that the world he inhabits is alien to the human project. He calls it the time of terminal paradoxes, a time conditioned by the unifying, simplifying engines of mass media (which, in his mind, are against the complexity of novels). The era we are talking of contains the birth and death of the individual, the death of God, everything from Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” to the smoking furnaces of Bergen-Belsen.

But first there is a bloom, a divine afflatus. Rabelais invents the proto-novel out of the Menippean satire (from the Latin satura, a stuffed sausage, or a hodge-podge), which we might think of as the earliest outbreak of experimental literature. Menippus’s work is now lost but, by repute, was characterized by irony, quotation, hybrid form, parody, and bawdy humour. Shortly after Rabelais, Cervantes writes a novel about a man rendered insane by books. A decade later, in 1615, he publishes a sequel, in which the hero has to deal with characters who have read the first book. An imitator (what we might today call a troll) is wandering around Spain calling himself Don Quixote. This causes Don Quixote such anxiety that he begs the local mayor to certify his authenticity as the real Don Quixote. Don Quixote is about the anxiety of a character dimly aware that he is trapped inside a book. In other words, Cervantes is already consciousness of the bookishness of books and the games that can be played with the words and the artifice of verisimilitude.

A hundred and fifty years later Laurence Sterne composes a novel without a plot, the blank page, the black page, and a book with plot diagrams. After Menippus, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne, there are no more techniques of experiment to be invented; they are only reinvented with different explanations. But the novel itself takes a detour into what Kundera calls the realistic imperative. Novelistic experiment resurfaces in Central Europe with the advent of various modernisms (with Schlegel’s German Romanticism in the background, hence Kundera’s love of irony and complexity) in the work of Broch and Musil and later the Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz (whose novel Cosmos [1965] subtly echoes Don Quixote; it’s about a character trapped in an image pattern). Kundera has, here, grasped a thread of experiment, of playfulness, that is also against the decline of values, the loss of Being, and the entropic tendency of modernity, which seeks only homogeneity and profit. (Cervantes is brilliant on the cruel and air-headed free spirits of the kleptocratic late capitalism avant la lettre.)

2. Cynicism (Lifting the Veil)

What we more commonly call experimental literature, what we might now, in the twenty-first century, call Establishment experimentalism, arises in the late nineteenth century (for art, with the Impressionists) and the early twentieth century (for literature, with the Surrealists). It evolves as an outsider (Salon des Refusés, 1863) critique of a basket of Renaissance and Enlightenment assumptions about truth, reason, language, self, and God. It lifts the veil (as in The Wizard of Oz [1939]) on the comforting and Philistine illusions of the modern Humanist project.

The work is difficult because it’s new, but not so new that it can’t be understood with the help of a little theory from Nietzsche and Darwin, of course. But Ferdinand de Saussure’s analysis of the structure of the linguistic sign accelerates much of the avant-garde invention by separating the sign from the signified, gesture from meaning. Much twentieth century experimental art is based on the inversion of sign/signified priority. The American experimental novelist John Hawkes puts it succinctly when he says that plot, character, setting and theme (conventional devices promoting the illusion of verisimilitude) are...

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