Literary Outlaw

I know John Gardner only through his writing about writing: The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist, and On Moral Fiction. On that basis, I’d always assumed him to be a stodgy, conservative character. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled across a biography of him subtitled Literary Outlaw, complete with a cover photo of him sporting long hair and a leather jacket. The description on the flyleaf refers to Gardner as “a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention,” and “arguably America’s most daring writer.” It promises details of a personal life “as chaotic as his writing was prolific.” Clearly there is much about this man and his work that I have yet to learn. I’ll have to read the biography and some of his fiction and reassess my conception of him. Any Gardner fans out there with a recommendation as to which of his novels I should try first?

What's Experimental about Experimental Writing?

The term “experimental writing” has been bandied about a lot lately in the literary circles that I frequent. I have to confess that the more often I hear it, the less sure I am of what it means.

In a recent essay, Marc Lowe defines "experimental writing" by way of contrast with "literary fiction," and in so doing entirely conflates the latter with "traditional realism." In his view, contemporary literary fiction requires “believable characters with memorable names and realistically portrayed attributes,” “plots that resolve themselves in a decisive, if blandly predictable, manner,” and “a clear and understandable (i.e. linear and tidy) storyline with a consistent style of narration (no abrupt shifts in tense/time, no blurring of who’s who or what’s what, etc).” Experimental writing, on the other hand, "[does] interesting things with language and/or narrative structure."

I'm sympathetic to Lowe's quest to defend experimental fiction but I barely recognize the literary landscape that he describes. It seems to me that, by virtue of what he excludes and includes, he has defined the term "experimental writing" so broadly as to subsume the bulk of contemporary literary fiction thus accomplishing precisely the opposite of what he set out to do. I’m entirely in agreement with Dan Green on this point:

Fragmentation, chronological displacement, shifts in point of view, and other forms of non-linear storytelling are quite common in contemporary literary fiction, so common that I would say the sort of naively realistic, unswervingly linear narrative Lowe describes is in a distinct minority among the books that appeal to today's literary reader.

I would go further and suggest that even contemporary genre fiction (though admittedly crime fiction is the only realm of genre fiction in which I read widely) no longer routinely adheres to the requirements that Lowe lays out for traditional realism.

What, then, is experimental about experimental writing? An obvious answer would be that experimental writing is writing that breaks new ground, that does something that’s never been done before. This sets the bar too high, however, given that there isn’t a great deal of new ground left to break. For example, there’s nothing wholly new at this point about stream of consciousness, or surrealism, or metafiction. All have been done before and done well. Indeed, many writers who embrace the label “experimental” explicitly align themselves with established schools of writing that follow set conventions.

Would it be sufficient to define as experimental work that simply breaks new ground for the writer? Clearly not. If I were to attempt to write a novel in the style of a classic western, it would certainly be an experiment for me. However, if I succeeded, no one would deem the result experimental fiction. If the term “experimental” is to have any meaning in the literary context, it has to attach to the work rather than the writer.

The most interesting definition of “experimental fiction” that I’ve come across thus far is one provided by Douglas Glover in The Enamoured Knight. He defines it in relation to realism, but he doesn’t set up an either/or proposition. He describes a continuum with “strict realist” at one end and “experimental” at the other, with plenty of space for hybrid forms in between:

What seems to be the case with experimental fiction is that it is always written with other, more conventional books or conventional notions of reality in mind; one of the primary effects of experimental work is the denial of expectation, the surprise the reader feels when form is inverted or twists back on itself or is in some other way subverted. Most commonly the experimental artist does this simply by drawing attention to the work of art as a work of art. A painting isn’t about the image it represents; it’s about surface, shape and colour. A book is a book. In this way, oddly enough, the experimental novel is tied to the strict realist novel, the same but opposite, like the right and left hand. They are both committed to a species of honesty, authenticity, or "realism." But the larger novel tradition swears allegiance to verisimilitude while the experimental tradition diminishes the importance of illusion and highlights the reality of the work itself, its materials, tools, and process.

This too is only a partial definition of “experimental writing” but, given what I’m reading and writing these days, it resonates for me.

The Logogryph

Thomas Wharton begins The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books with this passage:

In the early years of printing, books were often shipped and sold unbound. The buyer would either bind them later, which was expensive, or leave the pages loose. In this way a reader could add other material, remove leaves or arrange them in any order.

The book, a collection of highly original fictions, reads as if it could have been constructed in this manner. It contains pieces written in the guise of myths, folktales, short stories, poetic fragments, philosophical musings, and academic treatises. There is a whole history of books and of reading to be found within its pages.

In one piece a character falls out of his story and has to make his way on the outside. In another, two bibliophiles are driven mad by one another’s margin notes. In a third, a novel lives up to its jacket copy (“It will live in your imagination”), taking up residence in the reader’s head and thwarting all attempts at eviction. A fourth takes the form of an essay on the contemporary novelists of Atlantis describing their struggle with Atlantean identity in the shadow of influential representations of their island by British authors. A fifth depicts books as architectural features dotting the landscape:

Remains of other novels are few and far between, for obvious reasons. If the pages are not continually consulted, time and tide over a period of years erodes punctuation, and eventually metaphor. With long neglect of readership, the lower regions of the novel become flooded with brackish water, and oblivion eventually undermines the whole structure.

Of course, unlike the ancient books described in the opening passage quoted above, The Logogryph has been bound, and beautifully so. Gaspereau Press makes lovely books, and this one is no exception. But the contents of The Logogryph are linked by more than shared themes and a physical binding. An ongoing story of a family, appropriately named the Weavers, and a young would-be writer who is profoundly influenced by his association with them, threads through the text and ultimately provides it with a surprising unity.

The Logogryph is a brilliant book. I suspect it will stay with me a while, and unlike the book which so abused the hospitality of its reader in Wharton's tale, it will be a most welcome guest.

Wildly Disappointed by The Picture of Dorian Gray

It was an odd experience reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time at this late date. I know that I’ve never read it before, but I kept feeling as if I had. It was all so familiar: the beauty-for-its-own-sake aesthetic, the clever device of the portrait that ages in place of its subject, and all those rapid-fire aphorisms piling on top of one another. I had to check my impulse to take Wilde to task for using clichés and remind myself that he was the wag that coined them.

How, then, to push aside all that was so familiar to me, and approach the novel as something fresh? I couldn’t do it and I soon realized that I didn’t want to. For the bits that have become familiar even to those that haven’t read the book are the best bits. If they’re pushed aside, all that’s left is cardboard characters, atrociously florid descriptive passages, and clunky dialogue.

Let me elaborate. First, the characters. I found it difficult to get worked up about Dorian Gray’s descent into vice. Even at the beginning I didn’t see him as perfectly innocent or charmingly naïve but rather as vapid and petulant. Good looks notwithstanding, there didn’t seem to be much there to spoil. Basil Hallward is a nice enough fellow, but his pining after beauty/Dorian quickly grows tedious. Of the main characters, Lord Henry interests me the most. His philosophy is intriguing and his wit fairly dances on the page. But before long I wearied of him as well. There are too many clever aphorisms one after another; they often seem to be thrown in simply because they're good lines rather than to advance the plot or the reader's understanding of Lord Henry's character. On that last point, part of the problem is that the barrage of aphorisms don’t belong solely to Lord Henry. They are also spoken by the third person narrator, Mr. Erskine, and occasionally some dutchess or other at dinner, but always in the same tone and with the same sensibility. This has the effect of watering down the uniqueness of Lord Henry’s voice thereby robbing the novel to some degree of one of its best features.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the clever lines. I won’t pause to list my favourites here, but I will point you to a post at So Many Books where Stefanie has listed eight great lines that she marked just in the first eleven pages of the novel. The problem is that although there are indeed a plethora of great lines worthy of copying down, these are counterbalanced by many cringe-inducing passages of description. For example, this:

As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. His eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. He felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart.

Or this:

His finely chiselled nostrils quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling.

Or this:

Her flowerlike lips touched the withered cheek and warmed its frost.

It’s not a long novel, but passages like these make it hard slogging.

And the dialogue. How could an accomplished playwright like Wilde pen such dreadful dialogue? The dinner party scenes are quite good. But in those scenes involving only two or three people, a prime example being the scene in which Basil first introduces Lord Henry to Dorian, they all seem to take turns declaiming lengthy soliloquies rather than speaking back and forth to one another. Who would have the patience to participate in such a conversation? Surely even Lord Henry, witty though he is, would have to let someone else get a word in edgewise every now and again.

I admire Oscar Wilde enormously for his wit, his style, and his reckless courage. I love his plays. I wanted to love The Picture of Dorian Gray. But I didn’t. I don’t think that the novel is Wilde’s forte. Ultimately, it strikes me as a fascinating idea that just wasn't very well executed.

Stop by the MetaxuCafé forum for links to other bloggers’ posts about The Picture of Dorian Gray and to join in a discussion about the book.

Voices on the Radio

Margaret Atwood’s The Tent is an odd and unsettling little book. It’s a collection of very short prose pieces that defy classification. They’re not short stories. The publisher’s catalogue refers to them as essays, but that’s not right either. I’m inclined to call them monologues or, in a couple of instances, dialogues. I tilt toward these descriptors because, although Atwood’s characteristic precision with language is amply in evidence here, these pieces rarely conjured up visual images for me. Reading the book, I felt as if I was sitting in the dark listening to voices on the radio, voices that alternately lulled me and spooked me.

I appreciate Atwood’s willingness to experiment but I found the results to be rather uneven. When the pieces work, they're very powerful. Most interesting to me were the ones in which Atwood turns stories and the very idea of story inside out. She employs a wry, dark humour very effectively to this end. For example, of the would-be hero and heroine of “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon,” the narrator says:

Chris and Amanda are very likeable. They have straight teeth, trim waists, clean socks, and the best of intentions. They don’t belong in a book like that, and if they stray into it by accident they won’t come out of it alive.

Other standouts are “Orphan Stories” and “Horatio’s Version.”

But in other pieces, for example “Chicken Little Goes Too Far” and “Bring Back Mom: An Invocation,” the humour struck me as too broad, almost slapstick, the parody too easy. Voice alone isn’t enough to carry these pieces; they just never rose up off the page for me.

There are flashes of brilliance in The Tent but ultimately, as a whole, the collection left me unsatisfied.

Fictitious Reading Series 3

Fiction fans in the Toronto area, take note. The third instalment of The Fictitious Reading Series will take place on Sunday, February 26th at 7:30 pm in the gallery space above This Ain’t the Rosedale Library (483 Church Street). This month’s featured writers are Lee Gowan and Hal Niedzviecki. The evening will include readings by Lee and Hal, as well as an informal onstage interview with them. Stuart Ross will host and I will conduct the interview.

Lee Gowan is the author of three books of fiction, including the Trillium short-listed Make Believe Love and, most recently, The Last Cowboy. His screenplay Paris or Somewhere was nominated for a Gemini. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. The Globe and Mail described The Last Cowboy as “an engaging book that is at once funny, poignant and a razor-sharp image of that most tender and terrible of entities: the family” while The National Post lauded it for "resist[ing] sentiment and simplicity” and “restor[ing] the rural West’s complexity.”

Hal Niedzviecki is the author of six books including the novels Lurvy: a farmer’s almanac, Ditch, and, most recently, The Program. He is co-founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts, and of the annual Canzine festival of Underground Culture. The Globe and Mail pronounced The Program “fascinating,” “quite strange” and “original in every way” while Now Magazine praised its “soulful, beautifully written moments.”

Come out to see these writers read on Sunday night! And if that’s geographically impossible, check out their books.

Returning to My Notebook

In Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram, Iain Banks adds an extra layer to the narrative by not just writing about his pilgrimage to distilleries all across Scotland, but also writing about writing about his pilgrimage. At the outset he notes that Raw Spirit is his first non-fiction book, and at intervals throughout the text he shares with the reader the process of putting the book together.

Here’s an excerpt from an aside on note taking:

Taking notes; this is not like me. I usually just remember stuff, or very occasionally jot briefly in my diary if I happen to have it on me, or scribble something in the margin of my telephone list or CD list. Long ago in my wallet I used to carry a tiny notebook which I’d made myself; it was smaller than some stamps I’ve seen -- I can write very small -- but that was back when I was about twenty or so and having loads of ideas all the time; now I’m officially a boring old bastard of nearly 50 I don’t have the same number of ideas these days and so have no pressing need to have a notebook always to hand (mind you, quality not quantity; a lot of those so-called ideas back then were just god-awful puns).

At present I fall somewhere in between Banks’s two poles, both in age and in note-taking practices.

I used to carry a notebook with me everywhere. I eased into it with the diaries that I kept intermittently beginning around the age of ten. These were small books with glossy covers and the words “My Diary” embossed on them in gold, curlicued letters. There were only a few lines allotted for each day’s entry which I invariably found to be either too much or not enough. I graduated to small, hardbound volumes with blank pages, but despite the increased freedom these afforded for skipping days or elaborating on particularly significant ones, I hadn’t yet moved from keeping a diary to keeping a notebook.

That shift occurred in my teens when I traded in those neat volumes for cheap, spiral-bound notebooks. I’d read somewhere that opting for cheap notebooks was a good way of banishing one’s inner censor. It worked. Writing in a book with pages that could easily be torn out and thrown away liberated me to write down whatever came into my head without regard for propriety or narrative coherence. It liberated me to write the crap that I had to write through to get to the good stuff. I’d still sometimes begin as if composing a diary entry, but then spin off into fiction. In retrospect, I think that this is how I learned to write fiction. It was an epiphany for me when I first recognized that I didn’t have to make it all up, that grounding my stories in real details gave them the sense of reality that I was striving to evoke.

Eventually I gravitated back to the hardbound books, this time in a larger size. They no longer have an intimidating aura of permanence for me. I like the heft of them and I find the wide, blank pages inviting. I choose ones with covers that inspire me: reproductions of paintings that I like, or simply colours, patterns, and textures that please me. Sometimes when I’m experiencing a block, a new notebook provides a fresh start and gets me rolling again. It’s a psychological game but it works. Once filled, these notebooks are eclectic compendiums of thoughts, ideas, lists, quotations, research notes, and partial first drafts, with the odd newspaper clipping or photograph stuck between the pages. They’re the raw material that I work from.

But last year, rather abruptly, I stopped carrying a notebook with me. It’s partly because the deadline for my short story manuscript was then looming and my focus was on doing final revisions on the computer rather than capturing wisps of ideas for future projects. I think that starting this blog also had something to do with it. Notes about what I’m reading and thinking that I once jotted down in my notebook now frequently go directly into the computer as fodder for blog posts.

I still live in fear of losing good ideas. But I walk everywhere and I got tired of lugging a heavy notebook around. I could have just substituted a smaller notebook, but instead I made the switch to index cards. I thought that they would do just as well. Indeed, I thought that they might do better. Rather than cramming all sorts of disparate things into a single notebook, I could use a fresh index card for each new idea and organize them into coherent bundles later.

Reflecting on it now, I’m sure that I was wrong. The index cards work beautifully for notes relating to discrete undertakings like book reviews and blog posts. But I miss my notebooks. Looking back over some of them, I see that one of the most interesting things about them is the way that apparently disparate ideas weave together over time in their pages. Sometimes it’s the odd juxtapositions that provide a spark for a story rather than the individual blocks of content. At best, my stacks of index cards are only a pale reflection of the depth and the chaos and the weirdness of my notebooks.

So I’m going back to carrying a notebook. The only question is whether I should pick up where I left off with the last one (a big book with a leather cover in a lovely shade of green) and see where that takes me, or make a fresh start with a new notebook. Perhaps a moleskine with a discrete black cover, unlined pages, and one of those accordion envelopes in the back where I can tuck away the index cards that I will continue to use to jot down ideas for book reviews and blog posts...

Music for Writing

I recently watched an episode of The Writing Life which featured crime novelist Peter Robinson. I’m a fan of Robinson’s Inspector Banks series and I found the program most interesting. There was one facet that particularly caught my attention. While speaking about his writing process, Robinson clicked on his computer to display an iPod playlist of the songs he listened to while working on his most recent novel (the soon to be released Piece of My Heart). He explained that since part of the novel is set in 1969 he’d put together a compilation of songs that were popular that year and listened to them while he wrote. It wasn’t that he intended to explicitly reference the songs in the novel (though I imagine at least a few will garner mention), but that listening to the songs helped him to better capture the spirit of that time.

On reflection, I realized that I similarly use music to enhance my writing. For example, when I was working on a series of stories featuring teenage narrators, I listened to a compilation of the songs that I had listened to as a teenager. The songs themselves weren’t necessarily relevant to the stories given that my narrators didn’t all grow up in the same decade that I did. Yet it invariably helped to listen to those songs. I think that because those songs so viscerally evoke for me what it felt like to be that age, I was better able to write in a teenage voice after listening to them. More recently, while working on a long piece that is essentially a Scottish ghost story, I listened to the excellent CD Folk ’n’ Hell: Fiery New Music From Scotland over and over again. Somehow that blend of contemporary and traditional Scottish music matched up perfectly with the mood and sense of place that I was striving to create in the story.

All of this was rolling around in my head when I had the happy task of interviewing authors Jason Anderson and Alexandra Leggat at the most recent instalment of The Fictitious Reading Series. It was a natural to ask the two of them about connections between music and writing given that they both write songs and play in bands, and that Anderson has spent a good part of his journalism career as a music critic. Both were quick to say that music is an important inspiration for their fiction, but they were polar opposites when it came to the question of how music figures in their writing process. While there are several explicit references to music and to bands in Anderson’s novel Showbiz, he said that he generally writes in silence. Music with lyrics is a particular distraction -- he can’t listen to it while writing without being pulled out of the story he’s writing and into the story of the song. Leggat said that she can’t write without music, and that so far each of her books has had particular CDs connected to it that she listened to over and over again during the writing. The music seeps into the atmosphere of the stories. I was gratified to hear that Steve Earle and Johnny Dowd figured heavily in the writing of her most recent collection of short stories, Meet Me in the Parking Lot, as I’d definitely pegged that one as a collection of dark country ballads.

If this theme of the connections between music and literature intrigues you as much as it does me, you will want to check out the book notes section of the excellent music blog largehearted boy in which authors have created playlists for their recent books. February entries so far include playlists compiled by Lisa Carver for her post-punk memoir Drugs are Nice, Ander Monson for his collection of stories Other Electricities, and the various contributors for The Best American Erotica 2006 edited by Susie Bright. The book notes project is a fascinating and illuminating enterprise.

And now I come full circle. When I went digging around for the appropriate links to include in this post, I stumbled on a playlist for Peter Robinson’s forthcoming novel -- those 1969 songs that he was referring to in the episode of The Writing Life that started me off on this whole train of thought.

How does music figure in your writing or your reading?

Robert Louis Stevenson on Writing a Novel

Anybody can write a short story--a bad one, I mean--who has industry and paper and time enough; but not every one may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills.

Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book: Treasure Island” in The Art of Writing and Other Essays (1905).

Children's Literature Favourites

There’s a children’s literature meme circulating that I can’t resist. Shelly started it, and Kimbofo and Sherry have chimed in. Here are Shelly's questions, and my responses:

What are your three favourite children's series?
1. The Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace.
2. The Emily series by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
3. The Melendy series by Elizabeth Enright.

What are your three favourite non-series children's books?
1. Fifteen by Beverly Cleary.
2. The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
3. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (I know there were sequels, but I don’t really remember them, so I’m counting Harriet the Spy as a stand-alone).

What are your three favourite children's book characters?
1. Mary Poppins (from P.L. Travers’ books).
2. Pippi Longstocking (from Astrid Lindgren’s books).
3. Katie John (from Mary Calhoun’s books).

Commentary:
I had a great deal of trouble narrowing my lists down to three in each category. I tried to make things easier by restricting myself to books I first read as a child but even then I had to leave out many much-loved books, especially in the children’s series category. What about Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books? Or L. Frank Baum’s Oz books? Or Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books? And all those books that I loved by E. Nesbit, and Noel Streatfeild, and Catherine Woolley? And how could I include Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen among my top three stand-alones, but not include The Luckiest Girl?

If I added in all the fabulous children’s books that I first read as an adult, the task would be downright impossible. There is a whole realm of books that were available when I was a child but that I somehow missed until later. If I counted the best of those, I’d have to add Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain chronicles, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, Edward Eager’s Tales of Magic, Alberta Constant’s books about the Miller girls, and pretty much everything Madeleine L'Engle wrote to my list of favourite series. And Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle would unquestionably make my list of top three stand-alones.

And then there are all the great contemporary children’s books that I’ve encountered more recently. Some highlights there would include: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett, Journey to the River Sea and The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne-Jones, and Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

All that, and I’ve barely even touched on the YA category. But I’ll stop there for now. Suffice it to say that I’m a fan of good children’s literature.

What are your favourites?

Update:
Many bloggers have chimed in on this one. The list of participants reads like a who’s who of some of the best children’s literature blogs out there. Click over to see the responses posted at Big A little a, Chicken Spaghetti, Once Upon a Story, A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy, and Here in the Bonny Glen, and if you’re not already familiar with them hang around to browse these blogs. Each is rich with insightful commentary on children’s books.