Experiments with Narrative Structure

Experiments with fiction's narrative structure have been a focus for academic literary studies because innovations of this kind do not cross into other artforms. Nor do they need to disrupt normal text printing processes or meddle with the material structure of the book. Experiments with narrative structure have been 'safer' in publishing terms: for example, Italo Calvino's nonlinear novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979) was a best-seller in English in spite of it comprising mainly 10 beginnings to 10 different novels. In academic literary discourse, 'experimental fiction' is typically thought to involve experiments with narrative structure. A large number of these experiments involve mainstream writers and publishers. For example, William Faulkner's The Wild Palms (1939) (also known as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) has two distinct and separate novellas interwoven as alternating chapters to make a single novel, while Martin Amis's Time's Arrow or the Nature of the Offence (1991) tells its story backwards.

At the very beginnings of the novel form in English, the linear plotline was not yet firmly established as the convention. While writers experimented with a variety of forms – including the linear retelling of a character's 'history', as in some of Fielding's and Defoe's works – experiments were also aimed at testing the effectiveness of fragmented, discontinuous and composite narrative structures. These included, most notably, epistolary narratives where the plot emerged out of a series of letters sent between characters. In the 17th century, Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Noble-man and His Sister (1684) was very popular, as were Samuel Richardson's Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (1749) in the 18th century. In the 19th century two pioneering and highly influential genre works, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), both used the fragmentary form of letters, although Dracula used other types of documents too – journals and diaries, the newspaper clipping, the telegram, etc. In the 21st century the 'experiment' continues with popular novels comprising sets of email exchanges, text messages, skype transcripts, etc.