Include me in
The hows and whys of experimental fiction

By Masha Gutkin

'WHAT IS THE present? The present has never been described – how should we describe it?" Robert Glück asks in his introduction to Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. A sort of investigative manual for cracking open narrative, edited by locals Glück, Mary Burger, and Camille Roy and by Canadian Gail Scott, the collection clamors with the voices of more than 40 North American writers as they grapple with the project of storytelling in our times.

Most of the contributions that make up Biting the Error originally appeared on San Francisco State University's Narrativity Web journal (edited by the same team). The reader may recognize many of the contributors (Leslie Scalapino, Renee Gladman, Chris Kraus, and Aaron Shurin) as intermittently local. "We've gathered a cadre for radical narrative.... Our intent with this anthology is not to normalize a body of work, but to broaden and deepen the questions we can ask the field of fiction," Roy asserts. And though Roy may be referring only to written fiction, the investigations of this anthology have resonance for any artist communicating an experience of being in time.

Refreshingly, the book isn't a bunch of essays in support of a theory, and it doesn't overwhelm the reader with an overarching "tone." Most of the pieces are writers' explorations (in a riotous variety of forms) of their own work – and the personal leaks in quite a bit. What emerges from these investigations is a desire to break out, to crack open narrative conventions, which threaten to keep the writer, and by extension, the writer's story, in check. Picture narrative as a superficially smooth and glittering surface, at which the writer and reader together must keep looking, examining the jagged cracks from which untold stories are struggling to emerge. "The pen is a scalpel.... The surgeon heals through violence, a cut," Robin Tremblay-McGaw writes. "The excluded is invited in."

"How to include?" is a central question of the anthology. The familiar tropes of narrative – such as a unified "I" operating in a binary system of "givens" – are no longer useful. Traditional story constructs serve to obfuscate, rather than obviate, landscapes of personhood and social problems. How to tell a story where identity is split, or even spilt ("I believe it is possible to have one identity in your thumb and another in your neck," Roy writes); where language itself is suspect ("Disordered experiences cannot be forced to conform to already familiar styles of narrative," Doug Rice writes. "We must avoid being framed by languages, or worse yet, being used."); where the writer is "lodged in the cracks between categories, dynamiting [her] way out" (Kathy Lou Schultz)?

The writers – poets writing prose, queers, transpeople, people with disabilities, people of color, and writers to whom more than one of the above categories apply – do not see themselves represented by mainstream categories. And anyway, they resist being pinned down. Contributor kari edwards questions where labeling leaves us: "the 'I am this_______(fill in the blank)?' is a first step in seeing one's self as other than formlessness situated in social shame," she writes, "but should this be the stopping point? does it do anything more than reinforce the 'I' as the ultimate achievement, where the endgame is the epiphany of late capitalism – to become a consuming self-controlling anorexic life form on automatic." Writing, "I know my I's are always in flux. Eye and eye and eye," Douglas A. Martin insists that he cannot be pinned.

This resistance to staying put doesn't end with identity. It's a kind of ever present questioning that keeps narrative supple and available for the telling of potentially fractured and nonlinear experience. It's a vigilance that keeps narrative from shutting down. The writers question exclusions, binaries, and borders wherever they find them and invite the readers into these investigations. These can be sweeping – encompassing social structures of belonging, grammar, and literary history in a few dizzying sentences. And others are equally powerful with a much tighter focus. In a piece about the period, Betsy Andrews concludes, "In Japanese, the brush stroke connoting the period opens into a small circle. This seems right; the story of the 'o' in the mouth, fabric of space, breath in time. Do with her as you please." Andrews's instruction gives narrative poetic license.

It's notable that poets who've taken on narrative license are well represented in this collection: poets who – in addition to poetry, or, having abandoned it – write narrative. Writers allegiant to either genre, but especially poets, would do well to read the pieces by Pamela Lu and Eileen Myles. Lu's exploration of the distinctions between narrative and poetry (Lu sees the latter as "ideal for inhabiting the gaps between familiar idioms") and the necessity, to her writing, of both, is deliberate and lucid. Her essay is like an illuminated graph, charting their points of intersection. Myles's elegant conversation about the poetry-prose continuum in her work is itself a poem. Her casual urging that "poets should write novels en masse and reinvent the form and really muck up the landscape" is infectious.

In light of the ethos of resistance against delimitation, it's perhaps ironic that Biting the Error subdivides its investigation into categories. (These include, among others, "The Sentence," "My Other Self," "Shiver," and "Resistance.") For the seasoned narrative radical, these may be unnecessary (naturally, one could easily argue that various pieces belong as much under one heading as another). For the hesitant or novice narrative experimentalist, however, the headings can be signposts (albeit some are cryptic) to cracks in the narrative horizon. These signposts can help the reader choose which fissure she'd like to leap into.

A few pieces leave little room to engage with if one hasn't read the works they refer to, but even those allow one to question which conversations you, as reader, have access to, and why. Biting the Error can be called a manual because its writers, in investigating their processes, give us access to their tools, alive with struggle and possibility, and incite us, readers, artists, to use them.

Masha Gutkin is a poet and Bay Guardian food columnist.

Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative

Edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott. Coach House Books, 301 pages, $17.95 (paper).