Anyone fortunate enough to have an education in classical rhetoric knows by heart the four forms of discourse: argumentation, exposition, description, and narration. Aristotle taught us not only that language was the chief tool of persuasion, but also how to persuade. Centuries later, writers and novelists such as Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf demonstrated how words, sentences, and whole chapters could charm and enchant us. Readers, then, were not only persuaded by the pleasures of a text, but initiated into the scenarios and worlds words could create.
Then there are the scurrilous hold-outs, the authors who want to experiment with form, juggle your expectations, and even jangle your nerves. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published between 1760 and 1767, is the undergraduate English major’s bane of experimental fiction, the supposed example on which every metafictional author from James Joyce to Vladimir Nabokov cut their teeth. It is sly, funny, audacious, amusing but somehow also boring in its digressions, and maddening. Another eminent, though less known, example is the 1980 novel Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. This book is cryptic, darkly comic, boring in its deliberate assault on conventional spellings and grammar, and again, maddening. Both books try the patience while at the same time succeeding (mostly) to crack open a reader’s brain so that it might pour out in unexpected directions.
Tristram Shandy is a novel so experimental that it breaks every expectation of why we read books. The novel’s main character and namesake barely manages to get himself born one-third of the way into the book. Another character, Parson Yorick, dies (or does he really?) when a page goes black. As in, a vertical block of black ink. Another, Uncle Toby, regales the reader with his veteran’s tales of war campaigns in Europe. There is all manner of ruminating about the stability of words and words as human knowledge, inspired by John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. There is no discernable beginning to any of the narrative’s jumbled ruminations piled on interruptions, and scholars still debate whether or not Sterne intended for the book to have an ending. When British film director Michael Winterbottom adapted Sterne’s novel for the screen in 2005, the actor playing Tristram, Steve Coogan, recited that the book was a post-modern novel “before there was any modernism to be post about.” And that is as apt a summary as any you will get by reading up on this mad book by an Anglican minister who is obviously half-mad himself. More copies than even Moby-Dick, have been hurled against reading room walls in exasperation. To read Tristram Shandy all the way through is tantamount to rearranging the furniture in every room of your house. You may remember where to cook, sit, and sleep but why, you ask yourself, would anyone eat breakfast in the attic?
Riddley Walker, meanwhile, demands that readers struggle to reconstruct a vernacular warped by some unnamed combination of plagues, weather disasters, and nuclear war. In other words, it is a dry run for disasters waiting around the corner. As in Sterne’s ramshackle opus, the title is the name of our questing protagonist, a young man we first meet on his initiation into adulthood after killing a wild bore. But his story jumps across various villages of a ravaged southeast England to retrieve the remnants of joy, serenity, and comedy that once fed civilization through religion and puppet shows, in the spirit of Punch and Judy.
The protagonist’s struggle becomes the reader’s as we wind our way through passages bursting with deliberate violations of spelling, grammar, and even syntax:
I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some times theres mor in the emty paper nor there is when you get the writing down on it. You try to wor the big things and they tern ther backs on you. Yet youwl see stanning stoans and the backs wil talk to you. The living stoan wil all ways have the living wood in it I know that. With the hart of the child in it which that hart of the child is in that same and very thing what lives inside us and afeart of being beartht. (Riddley Walker, p. 161)
A critic for the London Review of Books wrote three years ago, in an appreciation of Hoban’s oeuvre, that Riddley Walker’s “success hangs on a hard-won dramatic irony that requires the reader to puzzle out the original references behind this brave new language in order to understand the consequences of misconstrual.” It is true that misconstrual is buried deep within every chapter, if not every page, but as though strolling through a field of landmines, the reader grows desperate for an anchor, any anchor, of safety in rote familiarity.
Perhaps my own apparent weariness with these novels betrays the fact that I love a literary challenge. Deep in my early twenties, when rent was cheap and time plentiful, I delighted in piecing together James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Everest of modern novels. Today, warped by the time-space continuum that compacts years into months as the phases of adulthood accumulate and fossilize, I instead shirk politely at reading experiences hell-bent on becoming jigsaw puzzles when they could be gateways to old-fashioned reading delights. In other words, the sort of books for which we might suffer paper cuts without noticing that we have paper cuts turning the pages.
