What Is Experimental Fiction?

The press is called The Journal of Experimental Fiction. People sometimes ask me, after forty years, what the second word means.

The honest answer is that I am not the right person to define it abstractly. I have never used the word 'experimental' as a stand-alone position. It functions, in the press's name, the way 'natural' functions in the name of a grocery store: it tells you what shelves we are stocking, not what philosophy we hold. We publish fiction that does not fit the categories the major commercial presses have set up to sort fiction by. That is what the name says, and that is what we do.

The reason there is a name for this kind of fiction at all is that the dominant form of the American novel hardened, in the second half of the twentieth century, around a particular set of expectations. The expectations are well known. Linear time. A central protagonist whose psychology the reader is invited to inhabit. A plot built on causal sequence. Sentences that disappear in service of the story. There is nothing wrong with any of these conventions; some of the books I have loved most operate inside all of them. There is only something wrong with the assumption that they are the only conventions a novel can be built from, and there has been something professionally wrong, for a long time, with the structural inability of the major American publishing industry to publish anything that is built from other conventions at any scale.

So a parallel publishing infrastructure built itself, slowly, over the second half of the century. The writers I came up reading were the writers this infrastructure made possible. Kenneth Patchen. Raymond Federman. Kathy Acker. Samuel Beckett. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. Richard Brautigan. Arno Schmidt. Italo Calvino. These writers do not resemble each other. They have very little in common as stylists or as thinkers. What they have in common is that each of them, in a specific way, wrote books that the major commercial industry of their day did not know how to publish, and they wrote them anyway, and the books survived through the labor of small presses, small magazines, and individual readers passing copies hand to hand. That is the tradition I learned from, and it is the tradition JEF is downstream of, and it is the only tradition I have ever been interested in publishing into.

There are two adjacent positions JEF is not. We are not an academic postmodernism shelf. There are presses (good ones; I am not running them down) that publish what an English department in 1995 would have called 'postmodern fiction,' meaning fiction that quotes theory at the reader and tests itself against the formal taxonomies of a graduate seminar. That fiction has its own value and its own publishers. It is not what we are doing. We are not, either, a genre-experimental shelf, by which I mean the imprint that publishes formally adventurous science fiction or formally adventurous horror or formally adventurous mystery. That work has its own publishers too, and I have loved a great deal of it. JEF, though, is not running a genre proposition. We are running a literary one.

What the literary proposition comes down to, on any given submission day, is whether the book in front of me is the book the author had to write rather than the book the market was asking for. That is the only question I have ever had to answer about a manuscript. The Patchen Award is the institutionalized version of the question. The 98 numbered issues of the journal are the longitudinal answer. The 99 books in the catalog are the same answer, told one book at a time.