One of the trademarks of “experimental” fiction, both recent and ancient, is its backlash against the label “experimental.” Here, let me settle for only two examples from somewhere in between the recent and the ancient. The last published critical work of B.S. Johnson, Britain’s “one-man literary avant-garde” according to his biographer Jonathan Coe, contains the following dismissal: “Experimental” to most reviewers is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful.” I object to the word experimental being applied to my own work. Certainly I make experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful: that is, it has been the best way I could find of solving particular writing problems. Where