Literary remixing
Eric Blix, Ph.D. has been New College’s writer-in-residence since Fall 2020. Blix is a 21st-century fiction writer—and actually makes his money that way. It’s a vanishing breed these days. The literary equivalent of blacksmiths.
Contemporary authors often feel like they’re swimming against the media stream. The art of fiction is traditionally solitary and contemplative. But not anymore. The noisy neighbors of the Global Village just won’t shut up.
Many writers dream of shutting out the chatter. Following Henry David Thoreau’s example. Finding a cabin in the woods and writing in solitude. Preferably with a quill pen and an inkwell.
Blix doesn’t dream of Walden Pond. He jumps into the media stream instead—listens to the ubiquitous, babbling voices. Like a DJ sampling sound bites, he borrows fragments of text, chops them up, and intersperses them with his character-driven narratives. The result is a meta-fictional collage.
You can see this patchwork technique in Blix’s debut collection of short stories, Physically Alarming Men. His fractured tales are witty, disturbing and hard to describe. Imagine a post-modern blender. Plop all of contemporary life inside and hit puree. Something like that.
“I think of it as literary remixing,” Blix said. “My fiction tends to be experimental.”
Blix brought his experiments to New College when his one-year residency began. His first semester course was a writing workshop, based on the concept of networked fiction—which is what, exactly?
As Blix defines it, it is the opposite of auteur theory. Writers connect on a digital network, contribute to various threads and ultimately create a collaborative story. His New College students did exactly that—and loved it.
The technique is one form of “literary remixing.” But it’s not the only one.
Blix’s course also explored a multitude of possibilities in experimental electronic literature. These include: the forking paths of early hypertext fiction like Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987); Shelly Jackson’s My Body (1997); b.a.n.g. lab’s The Transborder Immigrant Tool (2007), an immigrant’s odyssey disguised as a cell phone app; David Clark’s 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (2009), a philosophical fugue in the music of hypermedia; Michelle Gondry’s Detour (2017), a magical short film about a young girl’s quest for her lost tricycle, shot entirely on an iPhone; and the funny-yet-terrifying sonic distortions of Jaap Blonk’s what the president will say and do (2020).
These wide-ranging literary experiments teach Blix’s students a powerful lesson. An exciting sense of infinite possibility.
“In a multitude of ways, these e-lit authors have redefined reading as a total body experience involving more than eyes and hands,” Blix said. “They combine and alter sensory experiences to produce different fictional effects. Students get excited and start thinking about various ways that they could do that.”
Teaching is vital to Blix’s residency. But it also supports his own fictional experiments. His fictional ambitions aren’t small. He’s tackling the Anthropocene—nothing less than the era of human life on this planet.
“I want to show people where they are in relation to the earth,” Blix said. “I want to make it real.”
Blix expands on what that means. His description is reminiscent of those map kiosks proclaiming “You are here.” The difference is his project will map your location in space and time, your coordinates in the physical world, and also your place in geological and political history.
Blix adds that his work in progress will be a blend of method and message. His unnamed opus will imagine new, sustainable techniques. But he will also use those techniques to create his work. Once the project is complete, Blix hopes to distribute it on a wide range of platforms, and encourage people to reflect on their consumption of Earth’s resources—and, ideally, adapt a sustainable lifestyle.
That’s not just an interesting fictional concept. It’s a very real question of survival—and not the only one with which Blix is wrestling. The clock is ticking on multiple issues, from climate change to racial justice. We live in strange days. The news of the day is often surreal. As a fiction writer, how does Blix deal with it?
“I find it really difficult,” he said. “It’s a literary cliché, but reality has become stranger than fiction. How do I deal with it? I’ve stopped trying to outdo reality in my fiction. Basically, I just give up.”
That’s another way of saying that Blix has redefined what his fiction means.
According to Blix, modern humans are compulsive documenters. And they’re armed with high-tech devices that capture the moment in granular detail. The result is a constant stream of documentation. Instead of trying to isolate his own voice, Blix taps into that stream.
“The world is continually writing its own story,” Blix said. “I just try to find interesting stuff and put it together in interesting ways.”
That may sound like whistling in the dark. But, despite the dark territory of Blix’s experimental fiction, he still finds a reason for hope. It’s not imaginary, either. He sees it in his classroom every day.
“Despite the pandemic and the political unrest, New College students are really dedicated,” Blix said. “I’m impressed by the resilience I see in them. They’re an inspiration for me to keep going with my own work.”
Su Byron is the communications specialist for the New College Foundation.