In the wilds of experimental fiction, the reader is not merely a passive recipient of story and structure but a co-conspirator in the act of creation, an often cross-eyed figure whose interpretive capabilities are summoned to fill the non-linear narrative gaps, resolve shady ambiguities, and imagine the text into meaning. The reader, in these instances, becomes not just an observer but a maker, building tiny structures from the sculpted or shattered materials provided by the author, like some word-dazed mason stacking a Stonehenge in a storm.
The notion of the reader as a collaborator is not new—its origins can be traced to writers such as Laurence Sterne or James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake demands Simone Biles-level lexical gymnastics and whose sentences can get tangled like a pile of puzzles, situating the reader into the role of code-breaker or prisoner, depending on your view. However, it was perhaps in the hands of postmodernists—writers like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Evan Dara—that the role of the reader was most fully radicalized, where narrative fragmentation and authorial absence invited the reader to sit in with the band. As Roland Barthes noted in his essay, “The Death of the Author,” the meaning of a text is not imposed from above but created through the engagement of the reader, an idea which experimental fiction took to heart and thrust into the heart of its practice.
The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature…we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
In works like Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook, the text operates not as a neatly wrapped parcel of meaning to be unwrapped by the reader, but as a set of shifting, slippery surfaces that defy easy resolution. Dara plays with time, perspective, and language, destabilizing the traditional scaffolding of plot and character, or even immediately signalling where one voice ends and the next one begins. The reader is thrust into the serpentine space between words and meanings, the ellipses where logic can unravel and certainty’s legs get chopped out. Meaning here is never given but sought, and the act of reading becomes an act of construction, a fitting together of disjointed pieces that may or may not settle into place, the literal manufacture of the airplane that they’ve put into flight.
In a sense, the reader must work with language as a painter works with color, not only to see but to feel the material of the text, the way words ripple and refract through our narrow yet infinite neural tunnels. Speaking of which, William H. Gass’s The Tunnel, a novel whose disjointed structure and use of a darkening and unreliable narration demand that the reader not only question the narrative but also lock horns with the very texture of the language. Gass himself, in his essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” argues that fiction should engage the reader in the play of language, not merely its content. For Gass, words are not merely vehicles for meaning but forms in themselves, and the reader must not only respect them, but play them like instruments.
In Dara’s work, the reader is sometimes confronted with ruins—a landscape scattered with shards of language, fragments of thought, the occasional bloom of coherent narrative, but mostly the brambles and undergrowth of disconnection. The reader as archaeologist, piecing together a civilization or society that never fully forms but exists in potential. In this, the act of reading mirrors the act of writing. Just as Dara assembles his narrative through ellipses, gaps, and ruptures, the reader reassembles Isaura or Boulder or Chicago or Anderburg, Vermont or a Caribbean island through interpretive acts, filling the voids some dreamed architecture.
This process—this anarchic or, if things go swimmingly, sweetheart’s dance between reader and text—is where the beauty and desirable difficulty of experimental fiction lie. It is not a genre that allows for passive consumption; it requires effort, stamina, blind faith (which is not always rewarded) and a willingness to embrace the unswerving punctuality of chance. In a world saturated with auto-lit gratification and stories that have been steam pressed, the best experimental fiction serves as a reminder of the power of discomfort, of the richness that comes from the collaborative act of creation.
It is here, in the turbulent and radioactive waters of ambiguity, that the reader’s role becomes clear, as they move from the passengers cabin into the cockpit. As Gass said, “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.”
References:
- Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977.
- Gass, William H. The Tunnel. Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.
- Gass, William H. “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life, Knopf, 1970.
- Dara, Evan. The Lost Scrapbook. FC2, 1995.
The Evan Dara Affinity 