Chapter 24 Experimental Fiction

Birmingham's Bradsley on two points.Thousands of people walked along the street on their way home after dinner. "All we need is to do it, to push it," the engineering manager said to Mr. Dusilet's son. "I said to them - let's get on with it and get this thing right." Thousands of people returned to the factories where they worked after the meal. "I always scold them, but they know me and see me as their bread and butter. They only come to me when they have a problem. They do a good job, a good job. I will give it my all for them, that's it. they know."

The turning lathes made noise again in this factory.Thousands of people, men and girls, walked along the road outside.Some entered Dupret's factory. Some people stayed and ate in the foundry of the factory, and they sat in a circle around the fire. "I was standing in the doorway of the shop with my back to the door of the smoking shop. I was wearing a false nose and a green beard, and Albert was laughing non-stop, and at that moment he came in from the smoking shop. Albert came up to me, but I didn't pay much attention, when suddenly I heard someone say, "Can't you do something better than be a clown, Kitts? ’ He said to Albert again: ‘What are you doing standing there, Milligan? "I was taken aback and forgot to take the fake nose off because it happened so suddenly. I'll never forget it.

Henry Green (1929) "Experimental fiction" is a term Zola coined to indicate certain similarities between his sociologically inclined novels and the study of the sciences of the natural world.But this comparison does not stand up to scrutiny.A work of fiction is not a reliable way to prove or disprove social hypotheses."Experimentation" in literature, like other arts, is seen more as a radical means of accomplishing the eternal task of "defamiliarization" (see section 11).An experimental novel is one that clearly favors established methods of representing reality—whether in narrative structure or style, or both—in order to enhance or alter our perception of that reality. know.

The 1920s and 1930s were a golden age of modernism, noted for experimental fiction—Dorothy, Richardson, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf are just a few A writer's name comes at hand, and one writer's experiments will soon be appreciated by other writers and applied in other ways.Therefore, it is often difficult to attribute the discovery of a particular technique to a single author.Henry Green's opening is unmistakably characteristic of the period in its method.The discursive shift from narrative to dialogue and from dialogue to narrative is sudden, with no smooth transitions or interpretive connections, as do Picasso's Cubist compositions, Eisenstein's cinematic cuts, and T.S. Eliot's Scattered in Ruins The fragments above are similar.Fragmentation, fracture, and montage permeated the experimental art of the 1920s.

But there is a feature in Henry Green's originality, that is, the systematic omission of articles (a, the) from narrative discourse.It's not absolute (in this selection, people "sat round brazier in a circle"), but it's enough to grab the reader's attention and reinforce other, more familiar types of reduction (e.g., omitting finite verbs and feeling and Emotional nouns and adjectives).The traditional smooth and elegant narrative prose would read: "At two o'clock, along the street came thousands of people returning from dinner." Or in a more old-fashioned literary style: "Thousands of people wearing cloth Workers in hats and hoods hurried back through the filthy streets after hastily eating their lunches."

Henry Green was Henry York's pseudonym.His family owned a machinery company in Birmingham, and his parents wanted to train him to be the manager of the company, so he worked in various departments from the workshop to the top.In the process, he developed a deep understanding of the nature of industrial work that has been invaluable to him.He has a deep affection for the men and women who work in industry, and he respects them.A passionate tribute to working-class English life at a given moment, with warmth and without sentimentality. In fiction, and notably in the well-meaning industrial fiction of the Victorian era, one of the difficulties of depicting working-class life truthfully is that the novel is a form of blood-middle-class representation in which the voice of the narrative is always present between the lines. exhibit this bias.The narrator's words are always gentle and well-regulated; the characters in the book speak in dialects and slang, which is extremely vulgar; in this strong contrast, it is difficult for the novel not to reveal the experiences of the industrial workers described. A condescending, condescending tone.Consider, for example, Dickens' description of a scene in Hard Times in which Stephen Blackpool refuses to join a strike organized by a trade union for moral reasons.

"Stephen Blackpool," said the union president, standing up, "think again, think-think, boy. The big fellow won't have any more friendship with you." There were whispers of the same meaning, but no one spoke aloud, and every eye was on Stephen's face.If he confessed his resolution, all hearts would be relieved.He looked around and knew in his heart that this was the case.He didn't hold a trace of hatred for them; he knew them, and he could see into their hearts from their weak and chaotic appearance, and only the workers who worked with them could see them so clearly.

"Sir, I've groped. I just can't join. I'm going my own way. I've got to go." In this novel, Greene tries to bridge the uncomfortably stark gap between the author's language and that of the characters, intentionally deforming the narrator's words—as he himself puts it—to give them a certain Mead The simplicity of the Lan dialect, while avoiding that kind of "fluid elegance".This is not to say that the narrative sentences belong to the same register as the dialogue sentences of the characters in the novel.The book's narrative sentences are so economical that they only play a functional role, expressing the mechanical and repetitive routine labor imposed on workers by industry. For these routine labor, the characters in the novel speak with a kind of They resisted in particular ways, speaking poetically ("very well, very well"), using idiomatic phrases ("their bread and butter") and code words (when the manager of the factory came, someone used "yes He" issued a warning).Through such characteristic experiments, the old Eton schoolboy has marvelously crafted one of the best, if arguably, novels about factories and factory workers.

In Green's experiment, the purpose of imitation or expression can still be seen, so it is easy to accept and appreciate.Some experiments were problematic, such as stylistic deviations that artificially placed a barrier between prose language and its normal functions, such as words containing certain letters not used in composition, certain letters of the alphabet are also systematically removed.The late French novelist Georges Perret is best known for writing a novel called "Life: A User's Manual".He wrote a novel, "Death," in which he doesn't use any words with an "e".It is a feat that is even more marvelous in French than in English (Gilbert Adele is reported to be working on translating the novel, but no one would envy his work).The contemporary American writer Walter Abish wrote a novel, Alphabet Africa, in which each chapter obeys the following difficult rule: In the first chapter, only words beginning with a (such as "Africa again: Albert arrives, alive and arguing about African act, about African angst and also, also, attacking Ashanti architecture..."); Chapter 2 only uses words beginning with "B" and "A"; Chapter 3 Use only words beginning with "C", "B" and "A"; and so on.Each successive chapter allows only the next letter of the alphabet to be used, up to "Z".After the "Z", and vice versa, the allowed words are contracted alphabetically, chapter after chapter, until only words beginning with "A" are used.

It is probably more interesting to read reviews of these works than to read them.With such extreme constraints, it is obvious that novels cannot be conceived with the usual procedure—that is, to start with a theme or narrative core, and then to expand this core by creating behaviors and actors with a certain narrative logic.Set some restrictions on the form, but can tell a coherent story.This is a challenge.The motive, perhaps (aside from the author's own satisfaction at having proved his genius) was the hope that this restriction would help to achieve formal symmetry, to produce meanings that could not be created otherwise, and thus to derive pleasure.In this respect, this experimentation with prose resembles a general feature of poetry, like rhyme and rhythm.These experiments seem to intentionally cross the line that distinguishes these two forms of discourse, but despite their superb means, they are at best "barely included" in the art of fiction.