In an interview newly released for the first time in English, David Foster Wallace is asked about his taste for experimental fiction. A delightful quote pops out:
“When it’s experimental-looking, I never get the sense that it’s experimental because it’s trying to be experimental or trying to make some sort of coy point about structure. It seems that it’s experimental because that was the one and only inevitable way that the author could convey the dimensions of experience and emotion and cognition that was the story’s world.”
Which I want to probe just a little, because the implication suggests causality flowing one way – that the story exists independently, has its own world already, and in order to find expression, has to invent the language or the structure that would serve it.
When I think, rather, it may often be the opposite. That language creates story as often as the inverse. One of the sexiest ideas in neuroscience is how the language we speak shapes the way the mind functions (see also the documentary, Arrival). I think it follows that the narrative structures we use shape the mind in ways that are largely determinative of the kinds of stories we can conceive of, participate in, internalize, derive motive from, perpetuate all our little plots forward into subsequent stories, etc. Give a man a word for god, he will be able to tell the creation story. Take it away, and he will fumble, his sense of wonder grasping at air.
All of which is to say, when you create a new form for language to take, you also invite a new kind of story. And you may be surprised at the material that settles in to fill that container. Give us a new way of seeing a plot assemble, we might recognize points of tension that once lived outside our reckoning. Give a character a new mode of speaking, they might find they have new things to say.
If you’re wondering where the hell all this is coming from, I might be citing back to this post in a year or so, because it’s pretty good explanation of the process for a piece I’m working on now.