Experimentalism. Why.

                   all excerpts from The Rosy Medallions.

Writing I find exciting often gets called experimental. In America this is another word for marginal. It's patronizing!

         Other countries distribute legitimacy in literary culture differently. For example, when in the U.K., Kathy Acker wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. Can you imagine Acker writing for the New York Times Book Review!? Just the experience of reviewing her work in the NYT Book Review caused several reviewers to spontaneously combust. On the other side of the Atlantic, debates on literary aesthetics are part of public-not just academic--life. Not so here, which means the conventions of representation that underlie mainstream fiction in this country can't be effectually critiqued. (I don't consider academic debates to be part of public life.)
      So what conventions of representation am I talking about? Consider identity. Mainstream fiction tends to assume separate and coherent individuals, each with a single body and character which is built , rather than destroyed, by conflict.
      I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another in your neck. I think identities can travel between persons who have an unusual mutual sympathy. Let's not even mention multiple personality.
      But what I want to talk about today is the manipulation and construction of social distance. Mainstream fiction assumes a position not too close, not too far away. A situation is implied, an entire social horizon, which is speckled with white individuals who maintain distance from one another and from social "problems".
       Containment. Segregation. A narrative structure which covertly mirrors the growth of white suburbs since WWII, where there is no discomfort around racism because only white people are present. Breaking this long chain of social convention at any link can easily result in personal and literary deformity, which is another term for experimentation.

       "My sister was older, and kept her drugs and screwing in the basement the same way she kept her jewelry there. Her lovers were thin white men whose trouble was drug-related. When Paul got out of Cook County Jail he carried an odor of rape and had large nerve spots in his eyes. Fear moving like a breeze in a prison yard, I could feel that in my stomach when he was around; otherwise I didn't care. I thought about Monica. Her sharp teeth and brown cheeks. The way her greed slid across my hips could be scary but her palms were narrow as slots, that made it okay to have sex with her.
      Monica was black in a segregated city; so the closer we got the more transparent I became, my longing vicious as wavering lights of association. Relation - that's the spot where we're the same, or at least rolling downhill on a boulevard lined with palm trees and novelty shops."
                                                               ( My X Story)

       The well-modulated distance of mainstream fiction not only distances social conflict, it also doesn't represent lesbian relationships very well. Mainstream literary forms reflect conventions of identity that are dominated by the masculine and the heterosexual. I am not arguing for femininity in literature here. I don't find those essentialist positions very interesting. But I think relations between women have the potential to strain conventions of representation. HOW exactly. Consider the characteristics associated with women: weak boundaries between self and other, heightened capacity for intimacy, identification of self with other, and a more fluid sense of self. In mainstream contexts, these capacities are exploited until you reach, at the limit, erotic positions which have been emptied of subjectivity, e.g. BIMBO/CUNT. I think it's quite difficult, perhaps impossible, to represent a dyke as empty in that way. The corollary in the lesbian world to the empty sexual object is an erotic position I think of as invaded subjectivity.

       "I was her idea, the fix for a wife with lesbian dreams. She never told me the details but I could feel them pushing out at night, in the way that there's a ghost town inside every city. It made her ferocious but not personal. Once she wanted me to tell her my sexual fantasies. Confession is good information, she said, stroking my clit with her finger. I shuddered, then recoiled. What could I say? My mouth was unconscious. I should have whispered, It feels like your nostalgia."
                                                                       (Sex Life)

     I take it as a given that the well-modulated distance of mainstream fiction is a system that contains and represses social conflict, and that one purpose of experimental work is to break open this system. But experimental work can require a context of aesthetic ideas which many people who might otherwise be interested in it don't have. In this context, intimacy, autobiography, and direct address don't function just as content but are strategies for pursuing a reluctant audience. So are genre narrative forms, such as sex writing or horror.
     There are many roads into the succulent interior. How can the mechanisms of genre fiction get us (the cabal of experimental writers) there?
     Consider porn narratives. Usually people do not appreciate being taken apart. They rely upon having an ego, enjoy feeling integrated and in control, and experimental work that questions this can arouse distaste. What is so interesting about pornography is that loosing it is the point. People want to be taken apart so that ego control (resistance to pleasure) is subverted. Where there was distaste, there is now desire mixed with dread. Pleasures of the rupture, rack and screw. The audience becomes an unwitting collaborator in its own disintegration, in the interest of pleasure, or just feeling, period.
        Genre fiction is not about representing experience but producing and organizing feeling--sexual excitement, horror, mystery, fear. The aim is to invade the reader's subjectivity. To control, and then to release. The desire of the reader to be aroused or to otherwise escape is the key hole through which all the mechanisms of the narrative operate (note this turns the writer into a kind of spy!).
       Because genre writing deals in something as low as feeling, these forms are relatively easy to use in other contexts and for other purposes. They are already degraded, so their resistance is weak. Experimental writers using genre forms are like drag artists. Let us acknowledge the camp aspect to our more extreme performances.

"My mistress cuts & tucks one silicone 38D into my chest and then another, while I'm bound to our massive brass bed. Her kinky breath is soft as suede.
When I cry she tells me,
      The best titties are raised on the farm.
When I scream she says,
      Pain shreds & relaxes. You'll stumble over the real thing.       Think of scrub brushes and the perfect ending.
When I sob in agony she comforts me,
      Later we'll take a tour of the castle.
My mistress is cruel. She's bright as breath. She whispers to me as she cuts,
      I'm a fan of the flesh - tits, stuffing, sweetmeats.
      I suck the juice from the roast, I'm a pig with a straw."
                                                                                 (Fetish)

       How to pass suffering, eroticism ... from one person to another? Where does coherence fly apart? The answer to these questions does not lie in one or another particular strategy, but in the sensual devotion of the writer, taken to formal extremes. We explore our narrative tools, discovering exactly how they manipulate or release the painfully contorted social body - because it's the one we live in, the one which feeds off us, the one which has swallowed the visible horizon.

Camille Roy © 2003

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