The Myth of Experimental Literature: Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters” and Virginia Woolf’s Six “Waves” explained in Dashiell Hammett’s “Maltese Falcon”

Whether experimental literature is a myth depends on what you mean by experimental. If all you mean is that a writer has done something different, then of course there has been such literature. But if you mean that a writer has deliberately designed a new way of writing, then, in many cases, you are misrepresenting their creative process.

My two recent posts on Pirandello’s Preface and Woolf’s “The Waves” (in the context of prior posts on Woolf) show that the play and novel reflect the authors’ multiple personality, not a desire for experimental technique.

This reminds me of two things: first, the scene in the movie “The Wizard of Oz” when the wizard is discovered behind the curtain; second, a sentence in Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” (the book, not the movie), which I quoted in a past post (search Hammett), in the section on Flitcraft’s Fugue: “He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”