Experimental Criticism

In spite, or perhaps because of, its long life, experimental writing continues to flourish. It is a vast territory many of whose parts lie open to more exploration and elaboration. Even in a much cultivated area like fiction, a good number of possibilities are still unexploited or underexploited. Indeed, narratology, which aims to account for what all and only narratives have in common and for what allows them to be different qua narratives, functions as a powerful rhetoric by pointing to unrealized narrative potentialities. For example, novels could consist of free direct discourses (or streams of consciousness) issuing not only from single individuals or consciousnesses but also from (more or less) heterogeneous groups or collectivities, from plurivocal “we’s” instead of monovocal “I’s.” They could feature multi-voiced rather than merely dual-voiced free indirect discourses, mixing several language situations rather than only two. They could utilize all known forms of point of view successively: standard types of perspective (i.e, zero-degree, internal, and external), of course, but also hypothetical viewpoints or more eccentric cases like compound, unspecified, undecidable, or split point of view. They could be multipersoned, adopting in turn singular and plural first, second, and third person narration, and using I and we, thou and you, he, she, it, one, and they as well as ze, shi, zhim, mer, thon, and co. Quite a few years ago, in the Winter 1982 number of New Literary History, I gave an example of a narrative not yet written “a novel in the third person […] in diary form, using the future tense, and presenting events in a non-chronological order.” It still has not been written. I also envisaged a doubly repetitive narrative recounting n times (say, fifteen or twenty times) what takes place n times. I think that it has met with the same fate. On the other hand, I did, myself, produce countless narratives recounting 0 times what occurs 0 times.

Other dimensions of writing, for instance topographical ones, are considerably less exploited. If John Barth’s “Frame-tale” (1968) is a Möbius strip, if Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1961) or Robert Coover’s “Heart Suit” (2005) comprise a set of self-contained pages that can be shuffled like a deck of cards, and if there are numerous popup books or movable ones that involve images as well as words, there are not, to my knowledge, that many novels with three-dimensional pages. There are even fewer four-dimensional texts, in which time constitutes the fourth dimension and words, sentences, paragraphs (randomly) appear or disappear.

One area of writing which, when it comes to form, has yielded few experimental products is criticism. On February 8, 2016, as I was getting ready to write this paper, I googled “experimental criticism” and was referred to C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism (1961), a set of posts on cognition, evolution, and literary theory, and a blog entry gesturing toward experimental philosophy and wondering about experiments in criticism. Searches for “experiments in criticism,” “experiments in critical form,” “formal experiments in criticism,” and much more proved equally disappointing in identifying formally innovative and exploratory critical works. Wikipedia did not prove any more helpful. Though it had entries on experimental philosophy, experimental psychology, experimental economics, experimental pop, and many references to experimental writing, it kept mum about experimental criticism. Nevertheless, this kind of critical work does exist. I think that Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) as well as its 1951 forerunner, Léon Bopp’s Commentaire sur Madame Bovary (1951), Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974), Eugène Ionesco’s Nu (1934), Jean-Michel Raynaud’s Pour un Perec lettré, chiffré (1985) (which favors the subjunctive), and T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006) (thank you Alex Alberro and Nora Alter) all qualify. There is also the conceptual criticism (reminiscent of conceptual art) that is found in innumerable conference submissions and grant proposals or the appropriation criticism that regularly appears in journals and books. I, too, produced a couple of (admittedly timid) experimental pieces of critical writing. I wrote an article, for a 2000 special number...