Experimental Reading

It is undoubtedly true that the will to innovate can be identified in almost any literary text at almost any time, and it is equally true that certain texts display that feature far more prominently than others, quite regardless of period. Nevertheless, the notion of “experimental writing” as a recognizable and systematic literary tendency is doubtless a construction of our own time. Though I realize all of a sudden that the term “our own time,” which I use so blithely, also demands further nuance, for it, too, can be understood in several different ways. So to be more precise about it, allow me to suggest that experimental writing (from which I shall now remove those pernicious quotation marks) is an emanation of the literary avant-garde. In the French tradition (which is the one I know best, and the one I will mostly cite in what follows), the rise of the avant-garde is a matter of debate. Some people see its birth in Baudelaire; others contend that Mallarmé inaugurates it; still, others point toward Dada and Surrealism, two decades into the twentieth century. I have always thought that 1896 is a pleasing date because it was in that year that Alfred Jarry’s Ubu roi was first performed, with such astonishing results. One will recall that there were fistfights and full-blown melees in the theater itself and that William Butler Yeats expressed his own bewildered reaction in five pithy words: “After us, the Savage God.” Beginning with the magnificent solecism “Merdre!,” Ubu roi retains its power to shock a century after its appearance—and how many cultural artifacts of any sort can claim that distinction? Indeed, it was not until 2009 that the play was admitted into the hallowed repertory of the Comédie Française.

The power to shock, the iconoclastic impulse, the resistance to recuperation, the obdurate and aggressive rejection of the old in favor of the new: all of these are hallmarks of the nascent avant-garde. They find expression in texts as otherwise dissimilar as Raymond Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique (1910), Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918), Tristan Tzara’s Manifeste dada (1918), and André Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme (1924). One other feature that gradually becomes apparent as the avant-garde launches itself onto the cultural horizon and gathers a good head of steam is the impulse toward systematic experimentation, or, in other terms, an organized and programmatic process targeting specific goals.

One of those goals points directly and inevitably to us, as readers and consumers of literary culture. More precisely stated, the experimental text involves us, enrolling us willingly or unwillingly in the process of textual production, and enfranchising us in that process as full partners. In the first instance, it may shock and bewilder us insofar as it beggars traditional, normative strategies of reading and interpretation. Yet by the same token, it grabs us and demands a reaction from us; it engages us and insists that we do something with it; it rejects outright a passive reception in favor of an active, articulative one. Briefly stated, it makes us part of the deal whether we wish (and seek) to be enlisted, or not. It brings me moreover, conveniently if not subtly, to the proposition that lies at the heart of my argument:

Experimental writing obliges us to read experimentally.

For in point of fact, we can read it no other way. We grope around the experimental text, seeking points of ingress. We test this strategy of reading, then that one, in order to make sense of the thing. We try this interpretation on for size, then reject it in favor of another that promises to make more sense. We go at the experimental text hammer and tongs, gradually realizing that the text has been conceived with that very process in mind, and that in fact it anticipates our interpretive efforts. In other words, whatever else the experimental text may speak about—a young man coming of age in Dublin, for instance; or the difficulty of waiting for a person named “Godot” who never arrives; or the fact that the letter E has disappeared from the...