Experimental Writing in Modern Novels

Over the last few decades, many writers have constructed novels that structurally vary from the traditional method of telling a complete story through one point of view. Whether producing a memoir or a fictional novel, these writers incorporate real-life artifacts – photographs, quotes from real people, drawings – into their books and tell their stories through multiple points of view to create a more authentic world for the reader to navigate. Here, I use the word “authentic” loosely because it not only refers to what actually happened, but also what could have happened. In the case of fiction, these experimental writers successfully crafted stories that connect to the reader’s world because the novel includes these real-life artifacts within the text, which bridges the gap between the novel’s fictional world the reader’s real word. By doing this, these writers aim to create a more engaging and believable story for the reader that also structurally illustrates the book’s content. This experimental writing style can be seen in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Art Spiegelman’s Maus may appear to be a Holocaust memoir, but is actually an account of how a Holocaust story is recorded and produced. To show the reader how a Holocaust story is told, Spiegelman not only draws himself tape recording his father’s testimony, but narrates the story to show how it came into being. That is, he draws attention to the book he is creating by one, drawing a persona of himself as a characterized mouse recording his father’s testimony, and two, by drawing himself as a human wearing a mouse mask who is shown at his drawing table constructing Maus. Because Spiegelman’s goal is to show this process of creation, nearly everything he uses to write the story is included in the story itself – photographs of the characters (Richeau, Anja, Vladek), maps of Poland and Auschwitz, and the “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” comic Vladek stumbles across. Spiegelman incorporates these things because they are pieces of evidence that prove he actually did what he drew. One thing Spiegelman realizes when constructing his novel, however, is what Vladek says and what research shows doesn’t always line up. To keep his account authentic and show the reader one of the problems he encountered when making Maus, Spiegelman places Vladek’s version alongside what research says, thus illuminating a discrepancy. This occurs when Spiegelman says he “read about the camp orchestra that played” at Auschwitz, but Vladek says he “remember[s] only marching, not any orchestras” (II: 54). Ultimately, Spiegelman wants to create an authentic account of Vladek’s Holocaust experiences and demonstrate what it means to relay this account, thus why he draws himself recording Vladek’s testimony and why he draws himself wearing a mouse mask in the chapter “Time Flies.”

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is a non-chronological compilation of stories Kingston was told as a child and snapshots of her life. The detailed narratives comprised in The Woman Warrior are mostly second-hand learned and written in greater detail than Kingston initially hears. For example, Kingston spends several pages describing how Brave Orchid and Moon Orchid went to Los Angeles to find Moon Orchid’s husband, but later tells the reader her brother told her sister: “I drove Mom and Second Aunt to Los Angeles to see Aunt’s husband who’s got the other wife” (163). This expansion of what’s heard illustrates Kingston’s imagination, so that while the stories themselves aren’t “accurate,” Kingston’s telling of them are because that’s what she imagined happened. These stories may not tell the truth most people are accustomed to – something that literally happened – but are an authentic representation of what Kingston imagined when she heard them. Because Kingston isn’t sure whether the stories she’s been told are true, the reader can’t know either. Instead, she aims to create the world as she has come to know it, and that world is blurry; thus, to the reader, the distinction between fact and fiction is blurred.

Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods presents the story of a missing woman – Kathy Wade – and objectively lays out evidence and hypotheses of what may have happened for the reader. Because the story is unresolved and the reader never learns what happened to Kathy, O’Brien chooses to structure his novel in a way that illustrates this – by presenting possibilities. While the novel is fiction, it includes real-life quotes from Mai Lai soldiers and cites lines from various books that O’Brien labels “Evidence” chapters. He uses these quotes to, like Kingston, blur the line between reality and imagination because the novel’s resolution – the answer of what happened to Kathy - is only offered through speculations and evidence that never point to a single truth, but is laid out to reflect how a true investigation operates. The result is a fictional novel that includes factual evidence and works to make the reader believe what’s being read is real. But, as the unnamed narrator suggests, “evidence is not truth. It is only evident,” thus the reader is made to believe what one is reading is real, yet, reality remains an “imaginative reconstruction of events” (30).

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close uses photographs and plays with how text appears on the page to illustrate instead of just tell about what is occurring in the novel. For example, Oskar keeps a photographic journal called “Things That Happened to Me.” Instead of just mentioning the journal’s existence, Foer includes it in the novel to, like O’Brien, create a world that appears real because the thing being talked about is visually shown. The incorporation of Oskar’s actual journal is not unlike the actual evidence presented in In the Lake of the Woods. By allowing the reader to engage with the text, to see for oneself what is being described, Foer successfully creates an authentic world for the reader to experience the novel through. That is, the reader is able to see what the novel’s characters see. This also occurs with text where what the character is writing in the story is being shown on the page. For example, we learn that Thomas has lost his voice and writes single words or sentences on one page at a time, so Foer shows this by placing Thomas’ written dialogue on a page of its own. Foer also tells his story using multiple narrators. With Oskar, the reader only learns his story based on what he says and does, but learns Thomas’ and the grandmother’s stories through what the characters actually write because their chapters are presented as letters they are writing. While Extremely Loud is a work of fiction, the real-life photographs and other visuals – names written in color, the numbers dialed in Morris Code by Thomas, etc. – create such a real world that the reader begins to believe what’s being shown and written about is real.

Art Spiegelman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tim O’Brien, and Jonathan Safran Foer have purposefully written their novels in an untraditional manner because it represents their novel’s content more effectively, and creates an authentic world for the reader. Whether the novel is labeled fiction or nonfiction, these stories represent a form of reality in their each, unique way.

Works Cited

Foer, Jonathan. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. New York: Mariner, 2005. Print.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage International, 1975. Print

O’Brien, Tim. In the Lake of the Woods. Boston: First Mariner Books, 1994. Print.

Spiegelman, Art. Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon,

1986. Print.

--- Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Print.