Let's Do an Experiment

When a critic describes a work as "experimental," it usually is a term of praise and it usually ought to be decoded by the wary reader as a synonym for "self-indulgently tedious." This is a shame, for true experiment, in literature as in science, is a venture into uncertainty, when the outcome cannot be known in advance. Much can be lost and much is at stake, including coherence and the reader’s indulgence. Most experiments fail, to be followed by more experiments. Etymologically speaking, to experiment is to try, to attempt, with no guarantee of success. Ulysses is a grand experiment that succeeded grandly. Finnegans Wake, though often beautiful and funny, is a failure.

In an essay titled "The Bugbear of Experimentalism," poet-translator Christopher Middleton usefully suggests that we distinguish experiments from other sorts of imaginative writing according to the element of risk:

"In other words, what counts is the outcome of the experiment. It matters hardly at all whether or not you were telling yourself ‘here goes with an experiment.’ The fact is that higher degrees of ‘intensity’ in the imaginative act of writing create, at immense risk, the real thing, and that the lower degrees risk less and merely produce a placebo. Here I distinguish between creating and producing. My model for the analogy is medical experiments with drugs: subjects take pills, some loaded with the real thing, but some – placebo pills – loaded with nothing. What counts, I repeat, is the outcome."

Using this standard, Herzog is as much a successful experiment as Pale Fire. By allowing the title character to write real and imaginary letters to living and dead correspondents, Bellow risked ridiculousness. Instead we wrote his best novel, one of the best written by an American, yet critics are content to pigeonhole Bellow as "traditional" or "naturalistic," and Nabokov as "postmodern," "metafictional," or "experimental." It’s easy to forget that Nabokov was an experimental writer because his rate of success was so consistent. Middleton reminds us of the excitement that accompanies true experiment:

"Insofar as a high-intensity experimental creation in the arts fathoms and provokes real doubt as well as real imagination, its very radiance must be constantly tested by fresh doubts, fresh imaginings, across decades, across centuries. Here perhaps ripeness really is all. What counts is the sovereignty of the creation, its naked truth, the seminal dynamism and fertile integrity of the new structure as and in which you’ve delivered, out of the unknown, your new spirit or old intractable demon.

"If the thing works, then people may say: Yes this is like life itself. Or they may say: Yes, that’s a real outrage. Or: Yes, this is life itself as I’ve not yet conceived of it. So the creation doesn’t explain anything. Only its beauty relates it to explanatory scientific theorems. What a creation says may remain in the protection of that beauty forever an enigma."