'The Eternally Cold Experiment'

When our son who is a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy Skyped us last weekend, he asked if I could mail him a copy of Ulysses. I have three and decided to send him the Bodley Head edition with the lovely green cover, Odysseus’s bow on the spine, and a nice pleasing heft. Knowing his reading for classes was already heavy, I asked why he wanted to take on Joyce’s novel now. “A challenge. A change of pace,” he said. I understand. I first read Ulysses when I was sixteen, in part because of its reputation for difficulty. It was a macho stunt, though I didn’t know anyone who would be impressed. If the novel were merely difficult it wouldn’t be worth reading, which is why I’ve read it four or five times.        

Coincidentally, two days later a reader asked why I didn’t read “experimental fiction.” It’s a phrase that never quite made sense. An experiment tests a hypothesis. What does most experimental fiction test besides the reader’s patience? When I was much younger I had a taste for reader-defying books – Joseph McElroy, Coover, Gilbert Sorrentino, Arno Schmidt, Gass and the rest of the usual suspects. That wasn’t a complete waste of time. Except for McElroy, all had their pleasing moments – but at such a cost. In an interview, William Maxwell once said: “After 40 years, what I came to care about most was not style, but the breath of life.” The two qualities are not incompatible, as Maxwell’s own novels suggest. In his chapter on Eugenio Montale in Cultural Amnesia (2007), Clive James writes:

“In any kind of bad art, it is when the gift is gone that the experiment really does take over – the eternally cold experiment that promises to make gold out of lead, and bricks without straw. Leaving coldness aside (and we should leave it aside, because barren artistic experimentation can also be done in a white-hot frenzy), it might be useful to mention that Montale, in another essay, came up with the perfect term for a work of art that had no other subject except its own technique. He called it the seasoning without the roast.”