Experimental Fiction, Or What Is a Novel and How Do I Know?
Authors: Berry Ralph M. 
Published: July 2020

The essay interprets experimental novels as attempts to determine what a novel is, rather than as formal innovations or challenges to realist conventions. A consequence of such an interpretation is that the stakes of aesthetic discourse are raised unusually high, making an issue of the very concept. For modernist novelists like Virginia Woolf, these raised stakes mean that knowledge of what a novel is, although radically democratic, poses a problem similar to the epistemology of other minds, that is, a problem of subjective isolation, of solipsism. In such a context, understanding the history of novelistic practice subsequent to modernist experimentation requires acknowledging this potential of aesthetic knowledge to individuate readers and writers. That assigning an orienting position to specific novels or novelists today seems arbitrary, if not hegemonic, does not result from anything about the political and ethical conditions of aesthetic practice that modernist novelists did not themselves know. On the contrary, it results from the success of their experiments, from the aesthetic achievements of writers such as Woolf. What their conceptually transforming ambitions have made manifest is that, for those familiar with novels generally, questioning what passes for literary fiction today is not a matter of lacking knowledge, or none that even the most widely recognized novelist or critic possesses. This situation resembles the one addressed by Wittgenstein in the “private language” section of Philosophical Investigations. The specific resemblance is that, although concepts of either aesthetics or feelings, once questioned, can prove difficult to justify or explain, their difficulty presupposes no lack of knowledge of aesthetics or feelings. On the contrary, Wittgenstein suggests that this “picture” of a lack is itself part of the difficulty. In his later philosophy, conceptual problems seem to arise in much the way that novelistic problems in the post-WWII period seemed to have arisen, specifically, as a result of language users questioning the conceptual conditions of their own practice. For experimental novelists of the sixties and seventies, writing a novel seemed as ambitious an undertaking as for their modernist forerunners, but a question arose for them about what such ambition entailed. Had the modernists succeeded in laying bare the forms immanent in all classic novels, forms on which the significance of stories at any time depended, or had they demonstrated the limits of such forms? The difference was that between acknowledging what a novel is and rendering the concept unknowable, but both the acknowledgment and its skeptical denial seemed to follow from the same question. Wittgenstein’s solution to problems of this kind in Philosophical Investigations is to write such that hearing what the question asks means recognizing our responsibility for the difference. The accepted term among literary critics for writing of this kind is “performative.” It differs from representation in the way that an act of narrating differs from a narrative of action. The essay concludes by showing through brief readings of novels by David Markson, Carole Maso, and Steve Tomasula, that radically experimental fictions can go beyond self-questioning, performing an act of acknowledging what narration is.