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COMPOSITES AND UNCLASSIFIABLES
Composite works are hybridized texts, usually of considerable length, that employ a range of conventions and fit uneasily under the rubrics of traditional genres. They don’t merely blend two recognized genres—such as, say, the prose poem; instead, they pluralize various conventions more widely to form something like a purée. “Composite novels” might appropriate an oddball assortment of genres: pop quizzes, poetry, interviews, diagrams, photographs, computer code, emails, PowerPoints, folktales, screenplays, criticism, etc. etc. What we dub the “composite novel” also goes by other names that share a large degree of overlap although they are not perfectly identical with it: Menippean Satire, antinovel, nouveau roman, postmodern novel, philosophical novel, or poet’s novel. Composite poems, by contrast, are usually dubbed “long poems” or “serial poems.” They likewise contain a generic motley that frequently plays with visual layout, documents, and prose as well as different poetic modes and styles. Finally, there are a handful of truly bizarre composite texts that, even given our liberal ascription of the nomenclature for “novels” and “poems,” elude categorization. The mish-mashed conventions of such “unclassifiable” work cannot be understood in terms of pre-existing archetypes. In the most extreme cases, the lack of conventions and absence (or excess) of a gesture toward a framing genre threaten to render the work almost unintelligible—a risk that may be compensated by unclassifiable texts opening up to a welter of various interpretations and challenging their readers to find new ways to navigate them.
Links
● Aditi Machado, “On Etel Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse”
● Wayne Kostenbaum, sample from Hotel Theory
● Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror
● Bhanu Kapil, from Humanimal [feral children are fatty]
● bp Nichol, The Martyrology, Books I and II
● Thomas Bolt, Dark Ice
● Tyehimba Jess, poems from Olio
● Ronald Johnson, excerpt from ARK
● Derek White, images from Poste Restrante
● Tan Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary (2014) The Joy of Cooking
● Jan Baetens, on “Michel Butor’s Mobile”
● Louis Armand, Hotel Palenque
