Contextualising British Experimental Novelists in the Long Sixties

Joseph Andrew Darlington

School of Arts and Media

University of Salford, UK

Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy, January 2014

Contents

1
Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………………4

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….5

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………6

Chapter 1: The Experimental Writers and The Sixties

1.1: “White Heat”: The Scientific Sixties
1.1.1: “Experimental Literature?”…………………………………………………………………..14
1.1.2: Science and the Sixties………………………………………………………………………….20
1.1.3: Groupings, Movements, Contemporaries……………………………………………..24
1.1.4: Against the Nineteenth Century Novel………………………………………………….28
1.1.5: The Technological Context……………………………………………………..…………….32
1.1.6: “The Establishment”……………………………………………………………………….…….37
1.2: The Experimental Novelist in Context
1.2.1: Post-war Prosperity……………………………………………………………..……………….42
1.2.2: Calder and Better Books…………………………………………………..…………………..47
1.2.3: The Widening World of Education…………………………………….………………….51
1.2.4: Writers and the BBC……………………………………………………..……………………..55
1.2.5: The Arts Council……………………………………………………….……….………………….59
1.2.6: Public Politics and Pay Disputes…………………………………………..…….…………63
1.2.7: Feminism: A Revolution in Progress………………………………..…..…….…………67
1.2.8: Anthony Burgess: A Case Study in Influence………………………..…….…………71
1.3: The Death of Keynesianism
1.3.1: Keynsianism versus Neoliberalism……………………………………….….…………..75
1.3.2: The End of the Experiment……………………………………………………....………….79
1.3.3: The “Experimental” and the “Postmodern”…………………………..……………..83

Chapter 2: “Ground Down, and Other Clichés”: Class, Crisis and Consciousness in B.S.
Johnson
2.1: Critical Understanding of B.S. Johnson…………………………………………………………..87
2.2: Working Classness and Labour Value…………………………………………………………….94
2.3: “Meritocracy” and Class Anxiety………………………………………………………………….106
2.4: Authenticity and Truth…………………………………………………………………………………114
2.5: Turning Towards Terror……………………………………………………………………………...122

Chapter 3: “Without Taboos There Can Be No Tragedy”: Spectres of War and Rituals of
Peace in the Work of Eva Figes

2
 3.1: Eva Figes as a Post-War Writer…………………………………………………………………….128
3.2: A Feminist Anthropology………………………………………………………………………………131
3.3: The War and Women’s Experience………………………………………………………………142
3.4: Journalism and Politics…………………………………………………………………………………158

Chapter 4: “A Committee Plans Unpleasant Experiments”: The Cut-Up Culture of Alan

Burns
4.1: Critical Understanding of Alan Burns………………………………………………….………..165
4.2: Burroughs, Burns and the Physical Manipulation of Text…………………….……….167
4.3: The Experimental Novels of Alan Burns 1961-1973………………………………………178

Chapter 5: “Another City, Same Hotel”: Ann Quin and the Happening Society
5.1: The Permissive Moment……………………………………………………………………………..204
5.2: Desublimation through Style…………………………………………………..………………….209
5.3: Artaud and Ritual………………………………………………………………………………………..220
5.4: Experimental Theatre; Being and Happening……………………………………………...226

Chapter 6: “Disembodied Voiceless Logos”: Recuperating the Radical in Christine

Brooke-Rose
6.1: Critical Understanding of Christine Brooke-Rose………………………………………….238
6.2: May ’68 and the Postmodern……………………………………………………………………….245
6.3: The Experimental Novels of Brooke-Rose…………………………………………………….254

Thesis Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………….273

Works Cited.……………………………………………………………………..…………………………………….276

Figures…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….293

Acknowledgements

3
I wish to express my great appreciation to the University of Salford for funding this
project, my patient and forthcoming supervisor Glyn White and co-supervisor Peter
Buse for all their help, and all of the administrators and techs that come together to
make a university happen. The Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Austin, TX was
a great help to me in awarding me a Fellowship that allowed me to visit their archives.
Thanks also to the U.S. Embassy for granting me a visa, eventually. Acknowledgement is
due to Melanie Seddon and David Hucklesby for bringing certain details in the thesis to
light for me, and to Nick Middleton for his hospitality as London host. Thanks to
Stephen Dippnall, my co-conspirator in pedagogy, and to Jen Morgan for her righteous
spirit. I offer my thanks to the many librarians, archivists and others around the world
who provided me with access to their resources, with special mention to the
International Anthony Burgess Foundation and the ever-helpful Paula Price. My final
thanks to my family for all of their help and support along the way.

Abstract

4
This thesis focuses upon five novelists – B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, and
Christine Brooke-Rose – whose works during the 1960s and early 1970s (Marwick’s “Long
Sixties”) represent a unique approach to formal innovation; an approach contemporaneously
labelled as “experimental”. A number of attempts have been made to categorise and group
these texts with varying levels of success. Utilising new archive research, this thesis aims to
unpack for the first time the personal relationships between these writers, their relationship to
the historical moment in which they worked, and how these contextual elements impacted
upon their experimental novels. The thesis is broken into six chapters; a long introductory
chapter in which the group is placed in context and five chapters in which each writer’s career
is reassessed individually. The B.S. Johnson chapter focuses upon how shifting class formations
during the post-war era impact upon the writer’s sense of class consciousness within his texts.
The Eva Figes chapter encounters her novels through the consideration of her contribution to
feminist criticism and the impact of the Second World War. The Alan Burns chapter investigates
the impact of William Burroughs upon British experimental writing and the politics of physical
textual manipulation. The Ann Quin chapter engages with experimental theatre and new
theories of being appearing in the Sixties which palpably inform her work. The Christine
Brooke-Rose chapter reassesses her four novels between 1964 and 1975 in relation to the idea
of “experimental literature” proposed in the rest of the thesis in order to argue its fundamental
difference from the postmodernism Brooke-Rose practices in her novels after 1984. Overall, by
presenting the “experimental” novelists of the Sixties in context this thesis argues that a unity
of purpose can be located within the group in spite of the heterogeneity of aesthetics created
by each individual writer; overcoming the primary challenge such a grouping presents to
literary scholars.

Introduction

5
Scope

This research centres on the five writers: B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Alan Burns, Ann Quin,

and Christine Brooke-Rose. It seeks to unpack their meaning as a group of writers by

placing them within their contemporary context. Previous studies have centred mostly

upon these novelists as individual writers. Utilising these studies, new archive research,

and aspects of historical materialist practice I aim to demonstrate that these writers

can be legitimately considered as a group and that doing so provides us with a unique

perspective on the literary culture of Britain in the Sixties.

The majority of publications concentrating on the above writers are studies of

B.S. Johnson. The most notable monographs are Philip Tew’s B.S. Johnson: A Critical

Reading (Manchester UP, 2001) and Jonathan Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant:

The Story of B.S. Johnson (Picador, 2004). There have also been two published essay

collections focusing on Johnson – Tew and White’s Re-Reading B.S. Johnson (Palgrave

Macmillan, 2007) and a special edition of the journal Critical Engagements 4.1/4.2 – as

well as another forthcoming collection from Palgrave Macmillan and the soon to be

launched BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal. Christine Brooke-Rose has also received critical

attention in the form of Sarah Birch’s Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction

(Oxford UP, 1994) and the collection Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine

Brooke-Rose (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005) edited by Ellen J. Friedman and Richard

Martin. The Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted half of Summer 1985 Vol. 5 No. 2

to studies on B.S. Johnson and half of Summer 1997 Vol. 17 No. 2 to Alan Burns. Glyn

White’s Reading the Graphic Surface (Manchester UP, 2005) also devotes considerable

attention to Johnson and Brooke-Rose. There have been a number of paper-length

6
studies of these writers published, the majority of which are referenced within the

body of this work.

The writers have appeared in a number of studies concentrating upon post-war

literature as a whole. Philip Tew’s The Contemporary British Novel (Continuum, 2004)

and Sebastian Groes’ British Fiction in the Sixties (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) offer

brief readings of Johnson, Quin and Brooke-Rose and their place in contemporary

culture. Andrzej Gasiorek’s Postwar British Fiction: Realism and After (Edward Arnold,

1995) also makes use of Johnson and Burns, although it is largely to present them as

examples of experimental writing “pushed too far” (Gasiorek). The only full-length

attempt to categorise the writers as a group so far is Francis Booth’s self-published

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1980 (Lulu, 2012) although

the inclusion of twenty-five “experimental” writers in total rules out critical and

biographical connection in favour of an encyclopaedic presentation. The two

collections The Imagination on Trial (Allison and Busby, 1981) edited by Alan Burns and

Charles Sugnet and Beyond the Words (Hutchinson, 1975) edited by Giles Gordon

represent the only attempts by the writers and those around them to present

themselves as a group in print.

By reading these writers as a group my work aims to contribute not only

significant critical and biographical material for those undertaking studies of the writers

as distinct entities but also to make the case for reassessing the position of these

writers as marginal forces within their contemporary culture by outlining their

connections to a number of historically important developments and the resonances

these create within their writing. Although the implications of “grouping” are

problematised within the first chapter, the shared outlook and cultural positioning of

7
these writers taken as an aesthetic movement should be thought of as considerably

significant in the literary-cultural history of Britain the twentieth century.

Resources Used

In conducting this research I made use of both online and physical archives, a number

of which I could only access due to special circumstances. First among these is the

Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Austin, Texas, who awarded me a Dissertation

Fellowship: the resulting research appears in both Chapter 6 and in a separate research

paper. The British Library also allowed me access to their B.S. Johnson and Eva Figes

archive holdings prior to their being properly catalogued. The Lilly Library of Indiana

University, Bloomington, provided me with digital copies of their Alan Burns and Ann

Quin holdings. In Manchester, the John Rylands library gave me access to the Carcanet

archive which holds Christine Brooke-Rose’s papers from the 1980s onwards. The

International Anthony Burgess Foundation have been a great help from the beginning

providing me with access to their uncatalogued archive and directing me towards items

of interest.

Online resources used include the ubiquitous Googlebooks – most notably the

Ngram Viewer 2.0 released in 2012 – as well as MLA International Bibliography and

JSTOR journal databases. The British Newspaper Archive portal was of great use, as was

access to underground materials from ozit.co.uk and internationaltimes.it. The

Unfinished Histories project was opened to the online public in November 2013 and

informed Chapter 5 (although no quotations appear in the finished chapter), as did the

Ann Quin Facebook page. The numerous UK Government Freedom of Information

officers who conducted searches on my behalf were very useful in clarifying some

issues and only very rarely withheld information on the grounds of national interest.

8
Finally, my work as co-editor of BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal has been of huge benefit

not only in allowing me a preview of cutting-edge research but by connecting me to the

considerable network of scholars, researchers, fans, friends and contemporaries of B.S.

Johnson, all of whom provided me with extra perspective on the writer and his times.

Despite the numerous external archives made use of, the majority of secondary

texts nevertheless came from the University of Salford library.

Structural Outline

The structure of this thesis comprises six chapters. The first chapter concerns the

contextual background; how these writers can be considered a group and where this

grouping intersects with the material conditions of the contemporary society. The

following five chapters address each writer individually and in relation to an aspect of

their society which is of resonant historical interest. Within this structure, the writers

and their works act metonymically to an extent. Although the works of one writer may

be considered in relation to a key concept (eg. Johnson’s works in relation to class

concerns) the insights unpacked during the reading also impact upon the readings in

other chapters (eg. Quin’s working class background, Burns’ anarchism, Figes’ polemics

on the welfare state, or Brooke-Rose’s alienation from May ’68 class conflict, all benefit

from an understanding of Sixties class anxiety unpacked in the Johnson chapter). As

these readings involve a variety of conceptual approaches the stylistic qualities of each

section also vary with the work being undertaken.

Chapter 1: The Experimental Writers and The Sixties is separated into three

subsections, each of which is also divided into further subsections. The use of small

sections allows the argument concerning the writers as a group within their context to

9
be presented in a manner which addresses each important aspect in its turn. The first

section, “’White Heat’: The Scientific Sixties” outlines how these writers shared an

identity both in terms of their own philosophy of the novel form and as equally

marginalised by the mainstream literary industry. The importance of the

“experimental” as a signifier in the discourse of Sixties science-inspired ideology is

demonstrated and the ambiguous relationship these writers had with such ideas is

unpacked. The second section, “The Experimental Novelist in Context”, concerns the

various boosts and blockages presented by the post-war context and how these

impacted on and were in turn impacted by the writers. The third section, “The Death of

Keynesianism”, describes the social and economic events occurring at the end of the

“long Sixties” which frame the end of the “experimental” writers as a group or an

aesthetic and lay the foundations for “postmodernism” in its fullest sense.

Chapter 2: “Ground Down, and Other Clichés”: Class, Crisis and Consciousness

in B.S. Johnson concentrates upon the class aspects underlying Johnson’s works.

Making use of the newly-catalogued Johnson archive at the British Library the impact

of the writer’s class-consciousness is traced from his editorship of Universities Poetry as

a student through to the final novel he saw published within his lifetime, Christie

Malry’s Own Double-Entry. The “meritocratic” imperatives underlying the post-war

consensus are seen to result in a double alienation from both working and middle

classes which, in turn, results in Johnson’s militant approach to aesthetics and form.

Chapter 3: “Without Taboos There Can Be No Tragedy”: Spectres of War and

Rituals of Peace in the Work of Eva Figes concerns the memories of trauma and war

that emerge in Figes’ writings and consider how this may impact upon the

development of her feminist social and anthropological theory. Figes’ use of

10
“experimental” form to present an alternative mode of being to a literary tradition

framed by patriarchal structures is positioned both in terms of its historical contingency

- her theoretical and journalistic work being solidly located at the cusp of the “Second

Wave” – and its quasi-mystical concern for deep structures.

Chapter 4: “A Committee Plans Unpleasant Experiments”: The Cut-Up Culture of

Alan Burns locates the works of Burns alongside the rise of William Burroughs as a

cultural force and the popularity of physical manipulation of text as a technique (or,

“cut-ups”). Using the various descriptions Burns gave of his working methods, provided

both by published interviews, essays and archive materials, the development of his

writing is described from 1961’s Buster through to 1973’s The Angry Brigade. These

developments are considered in the light of the then-popular theories of Marcuse and

the Situationists as well as Burns’ own contention that “experimental” literary form

would incite an anarchist revolution in consciousness.

Chapter 5: “Another City, Same Hotel”: Ann Quin and the Happening Society

engages with questions of censorship and “permissiveness” in the Sixties by reading

Quin’s novels against the contemporary explosion in “experimental” theatre. Her

immersive style is positioned alongside the popularity of Artaud and physical theatre

(or, “happenings”) as a means of expressing direct, unmediated experience. The limits

of this project are considered in relation to Marcuse’s theory of “repressive

desublimation” and the shifting attitudes to censorship which are unpacked as the

chapter develops.

Chapter 6: “Disembodied Voiceless Logos”: Recuperating the Radical in

Christine Brooke-Rose is largely composed of research undertaken at the Harry Ransom

Centre archive and focuses upon how Brooke-Rose’s writing can be traced through

11
historical moments; the phase of more relevance to this thesis beginning with her

discovery of the nouveau romanciers in the earlier 1960s and ending during her

lectureship at Vincennes in the early Seventies. Addressing the break between 1975’s

Thru and 1984’s Amalgamemnon, this chapter argues that the process of enthusiasm,

disillusion and cynicism surrounding her experiences in Paris put an end to Brooke-

Rose’s “experimental” optimism for a new novel and inaugurates the “postmodern”

irony which marks her later works. It also makes the case that earlier experimental

works from the Sixties must, in light of this process, be re-read within their context

rather than taken as simply “proto-postmodern”.

Taken as factors in a whole, the chapters focusing upon individual writers and

their works therefore cover the impact of class relations, gender relations, the Second

World War, cut-ups, happenings, the permissive society, the events in Paris known as

“May ’68” and postmodernism. As important aspects in the cultural history of the

Sixties these themes not only inform our debate concerning these particular writers

but, by looking at these themes through the perspective of the “experimental” writers,

we are provided with a new perspective on the Sixties as an era.

Theoretical Approach

The literary theory applied within this thesis is, where possible, intended to reflect the

historical and contextual understanding of the writers to whose work it is applied. At

times a non-contemporary theorist will be referred to in order to fully express the

meaning contained within a passage, yet this too will seek to remain faithful to the

meaning as framed by context. A large amount of theoretical material was engaged

with in pursuing this project which will no doubt have left its mark upon the thinking

and reading contained herein. However, it cannot be too strongly emphasised that the

12
reading is throughout undertaken under the remit of the “Long Sixties” as a cultural

moment. That is, not only as a period that exists in empirical facts, biography and

written texts, but through a study of these, is seen to contain certain structures of

feeling, modes of being, inclinations and orientations particular to the period, just as

any period will have. The application of appropriate theory is necessary to negotiate

our relationship with the past, especially such a recent past as the Sixties, a period

both considerably familiar and simultaneously alien.

Chapter 1: The Experimental Writers and the Sixties

13
1.1 “White Heat”: The Scientific Sixties

1.1.1: “Experimental Literature?”

The first question which must be addressed when engaging with “experimental

literature” is what exactly the word “experimental” means within such a context. The

word itself emerges from the lexicon of the physical sciences, as in; “experiment:

(noun) a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or

demonstrate a known fact” (OED). However, during its transition into the language of

literary criticism the word appears to lose any sense of specificity. Suggestively,

“experimental literature” can imply difficult or esoteric writing, a certain exclusivity

which is diametrically opposed to the “bestseller” or the “traditional novel”. It is a

marginalising term which, nevertheless, can hold a certain allure for those interested in

the marginal.

Bray, Gibbons and McHale, in their 2012 essay collection The Routledge

Companion to Experimental Literature, embrace the term’s marginalising tendency. For

them “experimentation makes alternatives visible and conceivable, and some of these

alternatives become the foundations for future developments, whole new ways of

writing, some of which eventually filter into the mainstream itself” (1). “Experimental

literature” is never financially successful or popular, it is implied, but is rather a niche

affair which is nevertheless highly influential. Experimenters are writers’ writers;

generating innovations, some of which will eventually filter through to the general

reading public at a pace acceptable to conventional tastes. Such a conception of

“experimental” is highly evocative, a useful way of expressing certain tropes within

literature, yet is doomed to provoke more exceptions than those that fit the rule. The

tendency of essays within the collection to list writers and novels suggests how

14
academics often prefer to find writers to fit tropes, rather than identifying tropes

within the work of certain writers.

Conceptually, the term has a certain usefulness lent by its lack of any historical

periodisation. Unlike “postmodernism” or “romanticism”, “experimental literature” can

apply equally to Don DeLillo and Laurence Sterne, allowing critics to draw out

transhistorical formal features or trace large-scale histories of English literature as a

practice. Looked at in this manner one can see submerged within the term a liberal-

humanist philosophy of historical progression – borrowed perhaps, like the term itself,

from science – which posits literature in a state of constant development and

improvement. Literary “experiments” push us forwards, towards better novels.

Considering this, it is interesting to note the historical moments when the term

“experimental literature” was at its most prevalent. Fig. 1 (293) indicates two periods in

which the term’s usage grew exponentially, firstly in the 1930s and again in the 1960s

to reach all-time peaks in 1968 and 1970. Two politically charged, popularly

mythologised, post-war decades represent the periods in which “experimental

literature” as a concept emerged into the zeitgeist. It is the second of these which is

the focus of this study.

During the 1960s, some of the writers being most often labelled with the

increasingly popular term were B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Ann Quin, Alan Burns and

Christine Brooke-Rose. All writers of the post-war generation, all committed to

innovation within the novel form, they represent some of the key proponents of the

novel’s development in the 1960s. Equally, they were all largely dismissed by the

literary press of their time and have been mostly neglected by academic studies since.

Francis Booth, whose abandoned thesis on these and a number of other writers was

15
made available through self-publishing in 2012 as Amongst Those Left: The British

Experimental Novel 1940-1980, highlights the ambiguities involved in attempting to

categorise a group of writers as “experimental”: “there are certainly no shared

techniques or styles which these novels have in common, and which are usually

associated with experimental writing, but it is this lack of uniformity between the

authors and within each author’s works which is precisely what makes them

experimental” (687). In terms of form and content, a literary study can do little other

than categorise them as uncategorisable. Hopefully, by treating “experimental

literature” as a peculiarly 1960s term and focusing upon some of the writers it served

to marginalise, a historical picture of the era as depicted from the margin will appear.

The ubiquity of the term “experimental” to describe almost all non-mainstream

creative works by the end of the 1960s did not go unnoticed by those labelled in such a

way. Eva Figes, writing in 1968, comments that “at no time in the past have books as

different, say, as Malone Dies and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes been awarded the same

generic label and criticised as though they had anything in common” (“The Interior

Landscape”). Even supportive critics such as Anthony Burgess (whose relationship with

the group of writers in question is covered in part 2.9 of this section), who professed to

“feel strongly about [B.S] Johnson and about the entire experimental tradition, if one

may use such an oxymoron”, still felt the need to criticise “experimentalism”

elsewhere, in this case “the French, who, in my view, generally take to experiment

because they lack talent” (“Foreword”, 20). The suspicion that “experimental”

techniques might be used to wilfully obscure bad writing is a common occurrence

amongst the contemporary critics making more and more use of the “generic label”.

16
 Perhaps understandably, writers’ responses to the “experimental” label were

nearly entirely negative, often dismissive and at times genuinely angry. B.S. Johnson,

who famously responded to such labels “like red rags” (Coe, 397), describes in the

essay “Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?” how “’experimental’ to

most reviewers is almost always a synonym for ‘unsuccessful’. I object to the word

experimental being applied to my own work” (19). His close friend Zulfikar Ghose,

writing to Johnson in March 1973, mirrored such opinions, suggesting that

“experimental had connotations of being provisional which are surely irrelevant”. Giles

Gordon, introducing the 1975 collection Beyond the Words, featuring “eleven writers in

search of a new fiction”, goes as far as to say that “if a novel is labelled as experimental

or avant garde by a reader, then it seems to me that the book has failed in its primary

function… to be a novel” (15).

However, when considering how writers express their evident frustration at the

label there can be found some general hints as to what “experimental” practice might

be assumed to mean within their works. B.S. Johnson describes how he makes

“experiments, but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away” (“Aren’t You

Rather”…, 19).1 Eva Figes too, whilst adamant that “a good writer is not ‘experimental’,”

admits that “there are experimental stages, certainly, but you do not commit yourself

to print until you know you have got where you wanted to get” (“The Interior

Landscape”). In such comments we see how, in order to achieve the results that these

writers’ published works create, there will often be a number of “failed” routes which

are taken up, tested, and abandoned. These preparations are clearly identified as the

1
Speaking to Jonathan Coe for Like a Fiery Elephant, Joebear Webb recounts this saying of Johnson’s - “I
make experiments but I don’t show them to anybody” (397) – with the implication that it was a phrase
he often returned to in conversation.

17
real “experimental writing” and, perhaps under this understanding, the attribution of

the label to the final work is taken to mean that the piece appears unfinished.

Viewing “experiments” as part of a process of moving forwards and improving a

project through trial and error is also how those who saw the label as positive sought

to frame it. Charles Marowitz, “experimental” theatre director and collaborator with

Alan Burns, described the process as “a permanent group of actors conducting the

experiment… Experiment, either in science or art, is predicated on continuity” (Schiele,

104). Theatre, unlike novel writing, presents an even stronger case for viewing the

“experimental” as holding a historical role in the development of cultural tradition. The

implication that each “experimental” novel contributes to the progression of the

literary corpus – a rather ephemeral metaphor for cultural production – is more

palpably demonstrated by a series of actors improving a show in each performance by

testing and adapting material for best effect. The implications of a culture gradually

developing through experiment – a kind of “relay race” to use Johnson’s terminology –

would also explain how the very idea of “experimental writing” could elicit such strong

feelings either for or against. If the most dynamic literature, the most historically

relevant, is tied to whether or not it is “experimental” then what is considered to be so

effectively becomes the subject of history. From this perspective it is clear to see why

Christine Brooke-Rose, in defending her legacy in an interview with Tom Boncza-

Tomaszewski, would say that “B.S. Johnson did a great deal to defend experimental

writing but in my opinion… he was not an experimental writer. His stories belong to the

then fashionable drab social-realism” (28). The implication - that Johnson was part of a

passing fad – is clearly not one that Brooke-Rose would like to see applied to herself in

the eyes of posterity.

18
 Both positive and negative responses to the question of exactly who and what

constitutes “experimental literature” equally have their share of ambiguities, broad

brushstrokes, and jostling over the “canon”. In the midst of these debates, who is right

about what “experimental literature” actually is is more uncertain than ever. A more

productive way of engaging with the term and the writers it was applied to may be to

look at the historical context. Why does this term come to prominence in the 1960s, for

instance? A closer look at the Sixties themselves may help us to understand why this

conception of “experimental” writing emerged at this point. Fredric Jameson, in

dealing with the French nouveau roman (of which the British “experimental writers”

were often considered a pale imitation), takes the dramatic change in content and form

to indicate how “reading undergoes a remarkable specialisation and, very much like

older handicraft activity at the onset of the industrial revolution, is dissociated into a

variety of distinct processes according to the general law of the division of labour”

(Postmodernism, 140). On the cusp of postmodernity, the novel reflects the rest of

society in its increasing fragmentation, uncertainty and technologically-derived social

chaos. This cultural materialist observation is in many ways applicable, although a

closer look into the specific conditions of Britain in the Sixties will help us to view such

assertions in a clearer focus.

1.1.2: Science and the Sixties

In terms of what constitutes “the Sixties” chronologically, the most suitable

interpretation for our purposes is Arthur Marwick’s definition from The Sixties; one

19
which ends in 1973 or 74. “Just as [Eric] Hobsbawm has a ‘short twentieth century’”, he

writes, “I am postulating a ‘long sixties’… This terminal date pretty well coincides with

the one chosen by Hobsbawm for the ending of his ‘Golden Age’” (7). These dates are

initially useful as all of the writers covered in this thesis wrote increasingly non-

traditional works as the 1960s progressed and stopped writing them (for numerous

reasons to be later elaborated) around 1973-74. It also, however, traces the rise of

“experimental literature’s” usage as a term to its climax as seen in Fig.1 (293) alongside

a period of economic growth, technological development and expansion of the state

sector in the interests of democratic socialism. It will be seen how all of these factors

contribute to British “experimental” writing, and these writers in particular, in various

ways. Concerning the term “experimental”, however, the most notable aspect of the

post-war settlement’s ideological commitments was a firm belief in the potential of

science.

One of the most famous political speeches of the era quite neatly summarises

the extent to which scientifically-tinged language was invested with power, hope and

confidence. Reported in The Times 2nd October 1963, Harold Wilson’s “White Heat”

speech promised a scientific revolution,

but that Revolution cannot become a reality unless we are prepared to make
far-reaching changes in economic and social attitudes which permeate our
whole system of society. The Britain which is going to be forged in the white
heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or for outdated
methods on either side of industry.

The country was set for dynamic change which would overhaul society, removing the

old restrictions “on either side of industry” and replacing the old traditions of

Establishment and working class alike with a mixed economy. The “scientific

revolution” could replace class-interest with objectivity, the old and irrational with the

20
young and dynamic, reactionary and laissez faire attitudes with a scientifically

“managed” society.

The “scientific revolution” as a concept alive within post-war consensus Britain

took on an ideological role across society, albeit in various ways. Dominic Sandbrook,

who has used White Heat as title for his history of the era, unpacks how British science

was in itself “enjoying something of a thirty-year golden age”; “The mobilisation of

science to fight the Nazis had produced plenty of impressive benefits in peacetime

[and] British science consistently earned international renown… for anyone interested

in science, these were exciting times” (43). Yet it was not only within abstract science,

but across an increasingly technologically-equipped society that scientific advance was

felt. Richard Hoggart’s study of the working class of the 1950s describes the dawning of

the “progressive” outlook which such advance generated:

‘progressivism’ holds out an infinite perspective of increasingly ‘good times’ –

Technicolor TV, all-smelling, all-touching, all-tasting TV. ‘Progressivism’ usually
starts as a ‘progressivism’ of things, but cannot stay there; it ineluctably spreads
beyond things, by dubious analogies (190).

The war was long over, austerity was finally over, and now the appearance of luxury

goods in homes of all classes around the country that were derived from new

technology served to bring together a whole series of improvements under a catch-all

respect for “science”. The folk-memory of the sixties as a time of “permissiveness”

appears here as “progressiveness”; society moving forwards through “experiments in

living”. A comparison between how often the Swinging Sixties stereotype “groovy”

appeared in print compared to “Space Age” (Fig.2, 293) illustrates how, for the

mainstream of society at least, the Sixties were an era of scientific rather than

psychedelic marvel.2
2
Simon Reynolds, paraphrasing Tom Wolfe in Retromania, indicates how culture’s enthusiasm for the
“Space Age” worked in both directions. At NASA “there had been a frenzy of missions, five between

21
 Within the world of cultural criticism too the awareness of science and

technology as a potentially revolutionary force was not overlooked. Denys Thompson

introduced his edited 1965 collection Discrimination and Popular Culture with the need

for academics to address the “gifts of applied science to very large numbers of

people[;] more leisure, more energy to enjoy it, and a much greater spending power”

(9). The collection itself, with essay titles like “Radio and Television”, “Magazines”,

“Recorded Music”, is as much a testimony to the academic’s desire to engage with

these new mediums in a way never before attempted as the title – “discrimination” –

betrays a more traditionalist elitism. Such elitism, however, is equally illustrative of how

the “managed economy” envisioned the role of the state. Raymond Williams, who’s

1962 Britain in the Sixties: Communications is another illustrative work of proto-“media

studies”, complains of Sir Robert Fraser’s claim that ITV represented “the old system of

monopoly in Britain [being] carried away by a wave of democratic thought and feeling”

(89) and instead promoted state control of all communication networks and the

institution of democratic means of managing them. The people, rather than private

enterprise or a centralised state apparatus, should dictate programme making. In

America where talk of “socialism”, democratic or not, was taboo, media-studies

innovator Marshall McLuhan was so popular that “IBM, General Electric, Bell

Telephone, and others had been flying [him] from Toronto to New York, Pittsburgh, all

over the place, to give private talks to their hierarchs” (Wolfe, 139). Those in power

knew that the world was changing on account of science and technology, and they

were becoming yet more aware of how human beings, whether as consumers or

democratic subjects, were changing along with it.

December 1968 and 1969. But… the lay-offs began while Armstrong and Aldrin were still on their victory
tour. Its annual budget sank from $5 billion in the mid-sixties to $3 billion in the mid-seventies” (387).
The public interest in Big Science was directly reflected in government budgeting.

22
 It is against this backdrop of science-related optimism that we can return to the

scientifically loaded term “experimental literature”. Writing from Paris about the

“Nouveau Roman” a year after the events of May ’68 (the relevance of which is dealt

with in chapter Six), Christine Brooke-Rose talks of how experimental writing is

“introducing us, clearly and simply, to the twentieth century scientific and

documentary revolution on the one hand, and to the philosophic revolution on the

other” (881). The only one of the British “experimental” writers to really embrace the

term, Brooke-Rose nevertheless speaks with a voice recognisable across the group

when she describes

the twentieth century crisis in communication, deriving ultimately from the

revolution in physics, the breakthrough to a non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean
way of thinking, which has indirectly affected semantics, philosophy and the
arts. Only the novel lags behind (881).

Although the term “experimental” may itself be rejected by the writers of the Sixties,

the concern for creating a writing that fitted with the scientific era, a “revolutionary”

era, was paramount. Like most science-to-art metaphors, and especially determinist

ones, the idea of a “non-Euclidean” novel is an easy one to deride as hokum. However,

when surrounded by a society ideologically committed to science as an engine for

social and moral progression – a means of clearing away redundant traditions and the

weight of the past – it is particularly fitting that the debate surrounding non-traditional

novel forms is phrased in a scientific vocabulary. How better to determine the right

novel for the Space Age than through experiments?

1.1.3: Groupings, Movements, Contemporaries

So, who were these “experimental” novelists and why are these writers in particular of

interest to this study? There will always be difficulties in ascribing “group” status to

23
figures in the recent past and especially for the purposes of a literary study. Unless the

group is as self-consciously formed as the Imagists, to take one example, then valid

arguments over inclusions, exclusions, the group’s “meaning” and the validity of the

grouping status itself will constantly recur. Francis Booth, in his attempt to address such

a problem of whom exactly constituted “British Experimental Novelists” did so with a

list of thirteen writers who were definitely “experimental” and twelve who were

“fellow travellers”. The list includes older figures like Nicholas Moseley and Rayner

Heppenstall as well as countercultural figures like Alexander Trocchi and Jeff Nuttall

alongside the five writers selected for this study. Booth describes how “from the early

1960s to the mid-1970s there was a focus on the future of the novel and experimental

writing in conferences, symposia and anthologies” (586) of which the many recurring

figures formed a makeshift “grouping”. Due to Booth’s breadth of scope, however, the

resulting picture remains fragmentary, its mode of presentation that of an

encyclopaedia, as pre-war modernists, high postmodernists, professors and criminals

jostle for position within the same grouping. In order to avoid this dissipating effect,

this study concentrates on five writers who moved in the same social and professional

circles, and – more importantly – shared an approach to literature which they each

professed in different, yet ultimately mutually supporting terms.

What these writers – Ann Quin, Alan Burns, Eva Figes, B.S. Johnson, and

Christine Brooke-Rose – form then, is rather a set of very close associates of

comparable age and experience who write within the wider context of “experimental

literature” and the greater artistic and social currents of the Sixties in general. Thanks

to newly available archive materials, a picture of how closely linked these writers are

can now emerge. In spite of differing writing styles and approaches to culture, these

writers saw themselves as holding a shared set of literary ambitions. The differences in
24
each writer’s expression of that mission is what lends the group its fascinating diversity,

yet it is perhaps also why no previous academic study has attempted to define shared

“experimental” qualities. Hopefully, an understanding of these qualities will allow

further research into those other writers such as Maureen Duffy and Zulfikar Ghose

who receive an undue lack of attention within this study. John Calder, publisher of

Burns, Quin, and one of Figes’ books (of which more in section 2.3 and chapter 3)

compared the core of this group – those studied here - to the 1950s “movement”

(Wain, Amis, Larkin, at al.) which he saw as “very English and inward-looking… very

Oxbridge and middle class” whereas “my group came from the newly-educated

upward-thrusting working class or lower middle. Burns had the personality to lead a

new group, but not the staying-power… so, as a new school, it failed” (277). Whether

the rigidity imposed by a “school” outlook would have benefitted the writers remains

to be seen, although the class-conscious and progressive “continental” outlooks they

shared and the tightness of the circle in which shared opinions were expressed and

developed mark these writers out as perhaps far more interesting than an exclusive,

elite movement in terms of the Sixties context.

Christine Brooke-Rose, slightly older and so (importantly, considering chapters

Three and Six) not a child during the war, would be on the periphery of such a

grouping. Less active within the shared social milieu, more willing to “declare herself

unimpressed” (Coe, 22) by other writers’ works, and far more attracted to the French

nouveau romanciers than any British “equivalent” to the extent that she emigrated to

Paris in 1968; Brooke-Rose represents a writer uncomfortable in the “experimental

literature” scene of the Sixties who nevertheless produced some of its best novels and,

unlike the others, made the successful transition into high-postmodernism in the 1980s

to hold her own alongside Umberto Eco and Jean-Jacques Lecercle. For Brooke-Rose,
25
“women writers do not like new ‘movements’ and still shrink from declaring all over

the place how revolutionary they are. Political women, and hence feminists, have this

courage [but] it seems to me that the combination of woman + artist + experimental

means too much work and heartbreak and isolation” (Stories, Theories and Things,

262). Writing that statement from 1991, it will be seen that Brooke-Rose was

nevertheless central to what was being considered “experimental literature” as a trope

during the Sixties.

The influence of more formal “groupings” upon the writers certainly existed

but, like the group itself, tends to appear as a very mixed assortment – different

through the eyes of each person. B.S. Johnson, although praising “Robbe-Grillet’s

theory, which I find very convincing (that is, SNAPSHOTS and TOWARDS THE NEW

NOVEL)[sic]” in a letter to Zulfikar Ghose dated 26/12/1971, nevertheless describes his

novels as “arid and unreadable”, recommending Beckett, Joyce and Nabokov to Ghose’s

students instead. Alan Burns, submitting a self-written bio for Calder and Boyars to use,

states that “his [own] work is influenced by French and German surrealism”.

Meanwhile, Ann Quin’s numerous journeys to the United States result in an American-

influenced Tripticks and Eva Figes’ husband John was friends with many of the German

Gruppe 47 (letter, 1/3/67). As far as tracing influences, one could find connections to

almost any western “experimental” contemporary somewhere within the group. Taken

as a symptom of Sixties mass communications, however, such cross-continental

influences are perhaps not surprising. What is surprising is rather that the British

“experimental” novelists retain a distinct and unique identity which doesn’t seek to

emulate the approaches meeting with high praise abroad.

26
 As Alan Burns said in an interview with Jonathan Coe, the group, at least as

concerned B.S. Johnson, were not so much “his friends… that’s not quite the way to

put it. He didn’t fight for the writing of people he knew because they were his friends,

but maybe they were his friends because he loved the work, rather than the other way

around” (398). Johnson certainly championed those close to him in a manner one

would associate with a “movement”, going as far as to list those of his contemporaries

“writing as though it mattered” (29), in his essay “Aren’t You Rather Young to Be

Writing Your Memoirs?”, amongst whom are all the other writers in this thesis

alongside Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter and Anthony Burgess. Looking into the

personal archives of these writers one is struck by a sense of how such a mutual

admiration for each other’s work draws them all together, sometimes in spite of

considerable personal differences. On a list that Ann Quin kept of recommended books,

between the likes of Ibsen, Tennyson, Milton, and Sophocles, she places Alan Burns’

Europe After the Rain as almost the only contemporary novel (“list”). Quin and Burns

held a shared party for the publication of Tripticks and Dreamerika!, hosted by Calder

and Boyars, to which B.S. Johnson was warmly invited well in advance (“Invitation”).

Johnson was reportedly “permanently in awe” (Coe, 307) of Burns, and worked with

him on a couple of short films amongst other endeavours. Johnson was also equally

glowing in letters to Eva Figes – at one point signing himself B after reading her novel

and clearly identifying with the “fat” genius-writer character; “I usually sign myself –

but not this time!”. Alongside this mutual respect there was a shared conviction of the

novel’s importance as a form and a vital sense of urgency about bringing the form into

the modern era. They could become quite vocal upon such subjects, Ghose at one

point early on suggesting to Johnson, “I think if we are having a reading it would be

best if we didn’t make any speeches about ways of reading and just stuck to reading”

27
(letter, 3/10/60).3 In spite of lacking any manifesto or shared techniques, the group

nevertheless held the development of the novel form as a common cause; a cause

trumpeted with all the conviction of the original military units from which we derive

“avant garde”.

1.1.4: Against the Nineteenth Century Novel

In order to move beyond the traditional novel form, or at least to move those traditions

forward, the “experimental” writers needed a standard against which their non-

traditional forms and innovation could be measured. The great bugbear that takes this

role within their critical writing and personal conversations is the “Nineteenth Century

Novel”. For Brooke-Rose, “the great Nineteenth Century Novel has continued, in both

diluted and revivified forms, right through the Twentieth, but it has for a long time

shown signs of exhaustion in its turn” (A Rhetoric of the Unreal, 386). A clear indicator

of this exhaustion is seen in how “stories have escaped into new media, film and its

younger, as yet babbling offspring, television” (386). For Johnson, the end of the

Nineteenth Century Novel was symbolised by James Joyce opening Dublin’s first

cinema. The job of storytelling was then passed on to the visual medium, allowing the

novel form to “evolve” into something more and “for practical purposes where Joyce

left off should ever since have been regarded as the starting point” (“Aren’t You…”, 13).

The “experimental” novel is rather the truest form of the novel; a novel which aims to

advance the form itself into a mode more suitable to the modern era. Against the

stable realism of Nineteenth Century content and the thick, linear tomes of Nineteenth

Century form, the short, fragmentary and cliché-free modern novel would emerge as

3
Zulfikar Ghose, in spite of being very close to Johnson, was not as familiar with the others. In a letter of
16/9/73 he describes having only met Quin “briefly one winter [when] I went twice to a group of writers,
mostly Calder people, in Hampstead (and then abandoned them because they bored me with their pious
outlook)”.

28
the truest expression of the Space Age. Equally, the “Victorian” social ideology implied

by the Nineteenth Century Novel represents a particularly British form of tradition; the

argument against which similarly lends British experimental writing a unique set of

targets to that of other nations.4

Like the ideological usage of science and technology which existed during the

popular discourse of the Sixties, the rejection of the Nineteenth Century Novel had

both a practical and a moral aspect. The practical case is argued by Zulfikar Ghose in a

draft review of Johnson’s Travelling People sent to him in 1963, “about four thousand

novels are published in Britain every year and during the course of the year, the novel

form suffers some four thousand deaths. It is the task of the serious novelist to

revitalise the form…and thus to re-establish [its] worth… by demonstrating its historical

progress”. Within the tide of mediocre ephemera only a novel which is different will be

recognisable as a distinct work. In creating this novel for the modern era, Eva Figes

often wrote about using a “different grid”, that is, a form totally different to that of the

Nineteenth Century Novel which could represent “new models of reality” from the

moment of its conception and, from this new point, can only be further constructed

“by a painful process of trial and error” (“Note”, 114). The “experimental” is part of a

historical process of improvement in a way that past forms cannot be. The novelty

value that such an approach to novel writing creates can be seen at times to overtake

the work itself. B.S. Johnson, speaking to Alan Burns of his cut-up novel Babel says how

“I’m glad you wrote it because it saved me having to do so” (The Imagination on Trial,

4
A comparison with the experimental attitudes occurring in American literature, for example,
demonstrates how in the place of a critique about class and manners there more often appears a
critique of popular and high cultural form. Federman’s 1975 Surfiction promotes the “death of literature”
as an anti-canonising gesture, while Rubin Rabinovitz, in “Mass Art and Cultural Decline”, invokes film
and rock music as a remedy to a modernist art which appears to be “assuming the role of the defunct
aristocracy” (369). The British experimental novelists’ belief in the redemption of the serious novel as a
radical act is anathema to the American situation.

29
92), as if there was a necessity to the work beyond its own value as a self-contained

novel. Later Brooke-Rose, in a rather more blasé approach to practical “experiments”

wrote to her publisher to inform him that she had not used personal pronouns within

her “anti-biography” Remake and although “it will be invisible, like my other

constraints… you can add it to the blurb if you like” (4/10/96). 5 A break from the

Nineteenth Century Novel form is a success in itself, a reason for a novel to be

celebrated, even if the purpose for its use may not have been entirely achieved in the

final result.

The commitment to practically altering the Nineteenth Century Novel form,

however, is also at the heart of the “experimental” Sixties writers’ progressive project

against “old” political ideology. The Victorian novel portrays the world of the Victorians

and, as such, imbues certain Victorian values as an inevitable result of its traditional

structure. For Johnson,

The novelist cannot legitimately or successfully embody present-day reality in

exhausted forms. If he is serious, he will be making a statement which attempts
to change society towards a condition he conceives to be better, and he will be
making at least implicitly a statement of faith in the evolution of the form in
which he is working (“Arent’ You…”, 16).

The two aspects, political progress and novel form, are inseparable. Figes’ “grid” shares

this implicit set of values combined within a single idea – “the old modes seem

hopelessly inadequate” (“Note”, 113) – and goes as far in one essay as to present the

writers of Nineteenth Century Novels as conscious reactionaries in this sense for

assuming that “you can’t put new wine into old bottles, that you can formulate a new

idea in an old form, or that a well-worn cliché can be an eternal verity” (“The Interior

5
A further reading of influences could be developed here; aspects of Figes’ writing “in the moment”
being similar to Gruppe 47 practice and Brooke-Rose’s invisible constraints borrowed from Oulipo. The
results of all of these “experimental” methods, however, is always framed by the particularly British
opposition to the Nineteenth Century mode.

30
Landscape”). Indeed, in looking back at her experiences with the group from 1985,

Figes describes how, although B.S. Johnson had the habit of taking the aspect of

truth-telling too literally… he was being consistent in his own way to a belief
that Ann, Alan and I all shared with him: the belief that the seamless ‘realist’
novel is not only not realistic, but a downright lie. Of course all fiction is a form
of lying, but the realist novel is a dangerous lie because people have come to
believe it (“B.S. Johnson”, 71).

Like the post-war outlook of “progressive” politics and a movement towards a more

advanced society, the “experimental” writers had an ideological commitment to radical

structural change conceptualised in such a manner that to talk of aesthetics and

politics, the novel and society, as separate entities was not only to misunderstand the

fundamental importance of such a unity but to stand in the way of that progress and to

react against it by default.

1.1.5: The Technological Context

The context of the Sixties is not only important in an ideological fashion when

considering the “experimental” novelists’ conviction to create new forms for the

modern age but contemporary material conditions are also of vital importance when it

comes to understanding what forms these “new novels” and “literary experiments”

would take. The publishing industry, for example, was producing more novels than ever

before and was continuing to grow. From a yearly production of around 6,000 new

titles in the year 1901, post-war publishing reached a boom of 20,000 in 1955 and

continued slowly to increase from there (Williams, Britain…, 23). Yet, unlike France

(where 13 per cent of the population buys 75 per cent of the books) (Birch), Britain’s

31
main means of accessing novels was through the public library system. The state

expenditure on this system doubled between 1960 and 1968, with 30 per cent of

Britons registered as borrowers by 1970 (Birch). Every year the libraries made around

450 million book loans which at that time equated to “rather more than fifteen books a

year per head of population” (Williams, Britain…, 23). Commenting upon 1962 surveys,

Williams states that the “actual book reading public seems to be nearly sixty percent”

(23), suggesting not only a highly literate nation but also one to which novel reading

remained a popular entertainment activity. Booth observes that alongside Calder and

Boyars and Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press (publishers famously willing to publish

“experimental” works) “companies like Allison and Busby, Faber and Faber, and

Hutchinson New Authors Ltd were open to interesting new work” (587). This could

partly be explained by the grand scale of the reading public available at whom to

market their wares. Profitable businesses could hedge risky, but potentially award-

winning investments against profit making bestsellers (Calder himself published

nineteen Nobel Prize winners). The stability granted by securing contracts with state-

funded libraries would also allow publishers an increased confidence when it came to

future investments.

The increase in other forms of entertainment through adoption of new media

could also be seen as having a considerable effect upon how many “experimental”

novels went to press, in spite of the protests of the writers themselves. The advent of

television was in fact far more disastrous to cinema than it was to the written word.

From a 1945 figure of 1,585 million, cinema admissions had fallen to 501 million by

1960, and 193 million by 1970 (Seymore-Ure). In comparison, television ownership had

gone from only 2% of households in 1950 to a saturation point of over 90% by 1973.

The television “replaced” cinema as an entertainment activity, although whether the

32
effect upon its form was quite as clear-cut is unclear. As Raymond Williams describes in

his essay “Culture and Technology”, “a technical innovation as such has comparatively

little social significance. It is only when it is selected for investment towards

production, and when it is consciously developed for particular social uses… that the

general significance begins” (120). The development of cinema as an art form may

make the Nineteenth Century Novel obsolete for B.S. Johnson, but for the novel

reading public the novel appears more relevant than ever, if only due to a greater

numerical and economical availability. Does this “mass culture” erode the

“discrimination” prized by commentators like Denys Thompson though? From the

perspective of production it would seem that larger readerships would on the contrary

encourage a larger number of readers willing to engage with unconventional material.

In terms of how capable a national readership would be in interpreting Iiterary

innovation, one could also argue that the way in which mass communications present

narratives in such great quantity changes them from a singular event into a general

activity. One “watches” television as a distraction, a form of relaxation, whilst one

“watches” a film at the cinema as an occasion. The great popularity of soap operas

represents a vast consumption of “traditional” narrative, the subversion and alteration

of which by “experimental” forms becomes more readily comprehensible by a large

audience. Pop music, magazines, the cult of celebrity, “lifestyle” marketing, and

broadcast news all demonstrate increasing awareness and development of narrative

convention through the Sixties – it is not simply limited to novels, television dramas,

operas, theatre, and films as “creative pieces”.

In tandem with the increase in the British public’s novel reading and the

publishers’ rate of publication came technological improvements which revolutionised

the printing industry. Improvements in materials made paper cheaper and more readily
33
available and the quality of paperback books improved such that, unlike their 1930s

“invention” as cheap alternatives to hardbacks, many paperbacks were being

presented as desirable commodities in their own right. Offset litho printing, invented in

the 1950s, made possible the kind of small, cheap print runs which allowed an

alternative “underground” press to catalyse youth and radical culture from 1966 to

1974 (to use Nigel Fountain’s dates) as well as driving down costs generally. By the end

of the Sixties phototypesetting devices were also becoming economically accessible to

the small printer which replaced “hot metal” printing with a method both of higher

quality and of greater adaptability. When we consider pages from Burns’ 1972

Dreamerika! (Fig. 3, 294) and Brooke-Rose’s 1975 Thru (Fig.4, 295) next to Johnson’s

1964 Albert Angelo (Fig.5, 296), the increasing typographical innovation on the graphic

surface is showing us not only a growing complexity of composition but a far greater

ability to translate such graphic devices into print. When the “experimental” writers

talk about writing at the cutting edge of a technological era, they very much have in

mind the kinds of technology that would allow them to “do something new” with the

novel as a physical book. In a letter to Johnson, Burns swoons over the quality of the

book Johnson sent him; “a superb edition of HOUSE MOTHER NORMAL. The book is

good to have: paper, binding, colours – beautiful production” (25/5/71). Faced with the

exciting possibilities made available by print technology in the Sixties, the dreaded

Nineteenth Century Novel appears not only outdated in content but hopelessly

unoriginal in its physical construction too.

As with the idea of novelty embedded within “experimental literature” as a

term, it is again important to stress the extent to which these writers invested

themselves within the project of the “modern novel” not only by making occasional

alterations here and there, but by placing innovative practice central to their aesthetic
34
and narrative projects. As Glyn White writes, “it is crucial to our understanding of all his

graphic manoeuvring that Johnson does not recognise the artifice of the book as a

pattern or a falsification; the technological fact of the book is a given” (113). Whilst

reading a B.S. Johnson book, as with many other “experimental” texts that utilise

graphic devices, the reader is involved in interpreting the object itself as well as the

words contained therein. As well as allowing particular devices to create stirring effects

impossible within traditional forms, the additional level of aesthetic experience

perpetuates a general aesthetic shift of experience in which a reader, as the possessor

of an aesthetic commodity, comes to appreciate the object itself. Once the novel is

appreciated as an object then the notion of capturing that object in another medium

becomes an impossibility. In this sense the “experimental” novelists’ claims to

celebrate the novel as a unique medium are vindicated.

At its most polemical, the aesthetic appreciation of the book as a technological

object took on the same utopian gleam that Harold Wilson relied upon for the success

of his “White Heat” speech. Rayner Heppenstall, an “experimental” novelist of an older

generation who shared many of the younger group’s social circles, describes the 1971

Bedford Square Bookbang in which a tent including himself and Eva Figes listened

intently to Alan Burns speaking about how he “looked forward with enthusiasm to the

day when novels would be written by computers” (The Master Eccentric, 70).6 Peculiar

as it sounded, he was at that time working on just such a “computer program” to go in

his (ultimately unpublished) theoretical monograph Accident in Art. After describing

6
Whether it was Burns’ personal influence is uncertain, but Calder too predicted a future in which
readers would “be able to lie in bed, in the dark, with our eyes closed, and read in our minds a printed
page, or perhaps simply a film, projected inside our skulls, through the media of wires attached to our
skulls” (“The Novel”, 53)

35
how the “7090 IBM in Paris” was “calculating” a series of six sound structures to create

aleatoric music, he predicts that

simple epigrammatic statements probably still constitute the computer’s most

beguiling productions – and for anyone who’d like to have a shot at producing
some, but can’t scrape up half a million pounds for a computer, there is
heartening news… you can manage very nicely with dice – indeed with a single
die (19)

This is followed by a series of instructions for creating “computer poetry” and a

number of examples of what the results may look like. The development of this

particularly Sixties approach to writing is further investigated in chapter 4, yet for all its

considerable idiosyncrasy, Burns contains within this plan all the enthusiasms,

convictions and progressive outlooks of these “experimental” writers. Not only is this

writing making use of modern technology to develop accessible works for the

contemporary reader, in “making havoc of the classification system on which the

regime is established” (35) it places the reader “in the very bowels of political changes”

(36). These political changes take place against a very distinct backdrop, one specific to

the British Sixties in its particular expression, that being a fight against the power which

is embodied in “The Establishment”.

1.1.6: “The Establishment”

Speaking to Melanie Seddon of her time in the Sixties with Johnson, Figes, Brooke-Rose

and others, Maureen Duffy described how “ we were absolutely trying to do something

different as a group… we were the first generation of free secondary education and

probably the first in our families ever to go to university. I think that fuels the class

based interest in my work and others of that time”. The class aspects of these writers

are dealt with in this study most in-depth in chapter 2 concerning B.S. Johnson.

However, each writer brings their own share of “Otherness” to the traditionally

36
privileged male world of avant garde writing. Quin, like Johnson, was working class

although, unlike Johnson, did not manage to gain a university place (in spite of applying

for one prior to her suicide (Between the Words, 251)). Figes and Brooke-Rose both

came from immigrant backgrounds; chapter 3 dealing partly with how being a German

Jewish émigré during the Second World War impacts upon Figes’ writing, whilst

Brooke-Rose’s move to Paris researched for chapter 6 is in many ways a return “home”.

Alan Burns, a barrister-turned-anarchist, represents the most consciously political of

the group – his trajectory perhaps moving in the opposite direction. As a group it could

be argued that these writers represent the first (perhaps only) time in British history

when the majority of professional avant garde writers have not been ubiquitously

British, male, and comfortably middle class.

To return to the Duffy quotation, however, it is clear that the kinds of class

politics the group engaged in was not limited to demographics. Yes, they shared a

common background as children of the post-war Welfare State, but this is rather a

beginning than an end point. The questions of authenticity and capturing experience in

a legitimate form which are raised continually by these writers are shaped by the

“progressive” ideology of the era but they have their roots in life experiences “non-

traditional” in terms of the literary canon. As a result, the Sixties “experimental”

novelists are placed in the unusual position of being avant garde writers who are often

dismissed by critics as being “kitchen sink”, “vulgar”, and other class-laden epithets

usually reserved for writers considered “low-brow”. In response, the writers’ own

analyses of why critics fail to understand or support their writing can be summarised in

two words: “The Establishment”. The term originated with a Spectator columnist,

Henry Fairlie who began using the term in the very early Sixties “to describe the

invisible web of (generally right-wing) power that controls British life more effectively
37
than such public and open institutions as Parliament” (Carpenter, 130). An ngram

search of the word (Fig.6, 297) again follows a “long Sixties” trajectory which peaks in

1968 and burns out after 1973. This is not coincidence as, like “experimental literature”

and the ideology of the “Space Age”, there appears to capture a particular spirit of

Welfare State democratic socialist aspirations. “The Establishment” carries none of the

presumed superiority inherent in labels like “the upper classes” or “the elite”; rather it

suggests a small-minded and inflexible group who jealously guard their undeserving

power from the rest of the non-established people. For the “experimental” writers,

criticised for being both pretentious and unrefined, “the Establishment” fitted perfectly

with their view of the Nineteenth Century Novel reading critics, both philistine and

snobs.

“The literary establishment exists, it is not a mythical Aunt Sally”, writes Eva

Figes in her draft essay “The Interior Landcape”. It is a theme she develops in an essay

written for The Guardian in the same year, 1968, “The Writer’s Dilemma”;

in England nobody really expects writers to have the intellectual calibre of, say,
a philosopher or a mathematician; the review columns and the bestseller lists
confirm the cosily middlebrow, and people expect novelists and playwrights to
entertain, not tax their thinking overmuch.

It is of note that complaints of this nature often emerge as the writer makes political

arguments. In the Guardian, Figes goes on to compare the mental poverty of the

British literary Establishment with the German literati’s embrace of Gunter Grass’

complex, deeply political writing. B.S. Johnson too describes how “only when one has

some contact with a continental European tradition of the avant garde does one realise

how stultifyingly philistine is the general book culture of this country” (“Aren’t You…,

29) and that although

38
 the [British] avant garde of even ten years ago is now accepted in music and
painting, is the establishment in these arts in some cases… the neo-Dickensian
novel not only receives great praise, review space and sales but also acts as a
qualification to elevate its authors to chairs at universities. (“Aren’t You”…, 15)

The “establishment” is thus a class-based term first and foremost. One can write to the

standard of avant garde movements in other countries but the British “establishment”

always recognises itself and promotes itself above others. The stultifying effect of this

class prejudice is all the more infuriating as it stands in total opposition to the post-war

vision of progress. The progressive outlook is struck by the contradiction between the

desire for a scientifically advanced managed economy and the protectionist measures

of an “Establishment” who forever reject advance in favour of a reactionary rear-guard

movement.

It is here where we find the group in line with popular Sixties opinion, if only on

the level of discourse. Indeed, Harold Wilson himself proudly spoke of how “the Right-

wing Establishment has never tried to embrace me or buy me off. That’s probably a

compliment. Lady Whatsit or Lord So-and-So haven’t plied me with invitations” (Daily

Express, 8/11/62). Once in office Wilson continued to project an albeit tame version of

an anti-Establishment image; appearing with the Beatles, smoking a pipe rather than a

cigar, and neglecting to adopt an Oxbridge accent. It is on the rather superficial level of

accent that Britain’s post-war anti-Establishment middle class appeared to pride itself

the most. Tom Wolfe described a “new breed” in 1968; where “the American has

always gone English in order to endow himself with the mystique of the English upper

classes. The Englishman today goes American, becomes a Mid-Atlantic Man, to achieve

the opposite… going classless” (46). Philip Abrams, contributing the “Radio and

Television” section to Denys Thompson’s collection, also notices this “startling

obliteration of personality for the sake of maximum acceptability” which “forced” BBC

39
announcers into the “mid-atlantic” mode of presentation, “justified, before the

Pilkington Committee, in terms of an ideal of cultural democracy” (54). Although

unlikely that any of the “experimental” writers would have agreed that a change of

accents represented the final overthrow of the British class system, that the general

sensibility conformed with theirs in its conceptual synthesis of modernisation with

social democracy is testimony to the power of “the Establishment” as an idea to revolt

against.

Another useful aspect of the term “Establishment” as the chosen target for

Sixties ire was its flexibility. Unlike the specific economic term “bourgeoisie”, or even

the popularly used term “middle class” (or “upper middle class”), “The Establishment”

could be adopted by almost anyone who felt that a “properly meritocratic” system

would reward them more than the current system. Rayner Heppenstall, a fairly close

associate with the group – especially of B.S. Johnson – could happily take on the anti-

Establishment mantel in spite of being a long-established “experimental” writer,

producer of the BBC’s Third Programme, often racist and outspokenly sceptical of the

younger writers’ political aims. “I could have done the proletarian stunt as well as the

next man and was somewhat tempted to do it during the pink decade before the war,”

he wrote in his diary, May 1971, “if I were younger, I might be tempted now, for we

seem to be in for another pink decade, and working class backgrounds are in great

demand among writers” (The Master Eccentric, 69). One could perhaps put the right-

wing Heppenstall’s anti-Establishment sympathies down to proximity to the younger

writers and their shared anti-philistine sentiments. Either way, the elements of

authenticity and commitment that Heppenstall’s jibe at “the proletarian stunt” seeks to

undermine are the elements at the heart of the “experimental” writers as a Sixties

phenomenon. In order to fully understand this it is not enough to simply identify what
40
they were for and against, they must be located within their historical conditions that

the group’s full significance can be understood.

The Experimental Novelist in Context

1.2.1: Post-war Prosperity

Much like the writers themselves, the Sixties as a boom period finds its genesis in the

Second World War. The “post-war consensus” between Labour and Conservative

governments was a commitment to Keynesian economics in the form of the Welfare

State. With considerable post-war working class support, the Labour Party’s institution

of mass nationalisation with the aim of moving towards full socialism petered out into

a philosophy of the “mixed economy” as a modern, technological means of avoiding

capitalist crisis without the need for the dreaded Communism. A “managed economy”

promoted strong unions to manage workforces and strong regulations to manage

private enterprise; a methodical balancing of the two would, theoretically, maintain

high demand, reduce poverty, increase democracy, and promote growth. Alongside the

much-vaunted full employment of the Sixties, David Harvey also marks out

“suburbanisation… , urban renewal, geographical expansion of transport and

communications systems, and infrastructural development… co-ordinated by way of

interlinked financial centres” (Condition of…, 132) as specific sites of Sixties economic

success.

41
 In order to demonstrate the relative effectiveness of this economic policy as a

means of “managing” post-war growth; it is worth turning for a moment to hard

figures in order to provide a certain amount of evidence for Sixties prosperity –

something which many studies either neglect entirely or else claim from second-hand

opinions. As a measure of Keynesian national expenditure policy, Lowe’s statistics show

that from an initial £5779 million budget expenditure in 1945 (weighted at 58.4% of

GDP), the total government expenditure reached £9001 million in 1960 (only

amounting to 32.6% of GDP) and, by 1970 (still at only 39.3% of GDP) had increased to

£20857 million. Even set against inflation this quadrupling of state expenditure

demonstrates a massive commitment to government provision, whilst set against GDP

its claim to have grown the economy can also be seen as justified. As well as a hugely

increased Welfare State to provide housing, education, health, pensions, and

unemployment provision, the working people of Britain also saw considerable

improvements to their quality of life through the “managed” economy’s commitment

to full employment which, by removing the reserve army of labour, strengthened

organised labour’s hand in industrial disputes. As Marwick writes, “weekly wage rates

rose 25 per cent between 1955 and 1960, and had risen by 88 per cent in 1969. When

overtime is taken into account, we find average weekly earnings rose 34 per cent

between 1955 and 1960, and 130 per cent between 1955 and 1969” (258). The

cumulative effect of a growth economy, wage rises and the confidence provided by a

“cradle to grave” Welfare State drove a boom in consumer spending considerable

enough to kick-start what is now known as “consumer culture”. Meanwhile, as

demonstrated in Fig.7 (297) from Lowe (303), wealth accumulation became a

possibility for the “bottom” 80% of the country for the first time on record.

42
 A consideration of growth rates across all levels of the economy indicate the

extent of the shifts which Britain saw in the Sixties. Mass communications, motorways

and access to foreign holidays, “youth culture”, and a tenfold increase in private car

ownership (Robinson and Bamford, 284) made the world a smaller place. From Burns

and Quin’s travels in America to B.S. Johnson’s numerous holidays in Wales, the

geography of Sixties living expanded the scope of the average British citizen’s

experience – again alienating them from the “parochial” qualities of the past and the

Establishment. The improvements in housing and reduction in the power of private

landlords (the end of the infamous “Rachmanism”, or slum landlords, for example) can

be seen represented in Short’s statistics in Fig. 8 (298) and Fig. 9 (298). The ideological

importance of these changes, as will be described further in Part 3 of this chapter, lie in

the fact that the economic foundations of meritocratic expectation have been laid. Not

only does life in the Sixties imply easier movement, but increased stability in the

physical form of better quality, more easily available houses and more employment

positions available than there are people living in the country. In contrast to the now-

ubiquitous view of Sixties architectural modernism as inherently flawed and hubristic,

those projects which received adequate funding were sources of great enthusiasm;

Johnson himself made a half hour BBC documentary, The Smithsons on Housing,

singing the praises of Britain’s foremost Brutalist pioneers. 7 Similarly, full employment

was resulting in considerable immigration from recently emancipated British colonies

which, in spaces like the “Cablestrasse” of B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo, helped to

diversify British culture and expand the horizons of the social imagination. These vast

social changes undoubtedly brought their share of upheaval, although subsequent

7
Living spaces and the pride that comes with acquiring property is a little-noticed theme which recurs in
Johnson’s work. He notes this pride in his friend Tony in The Unfortunates, comments on architecture’s
relation to class throughout Albert Angelo and, according to Ghose, proudly showed off the “room
where he will write” upon buying “a house in Dagmar Terrace” (“Bryan”, 34).

43
reaction has done much to distort the collective memory, imprinting Sixties

developments with the marks of later failures.

This economic overview of the British Sixties as an era is important if we are to

place in perspective the relative material hardships that the “experimental” group

endured as writers. In spite of constant money worries, a number of them reached a

level of income such that they could survive on the proceeds of their writing; Eva Figes

through journalism, B.S. Johnson through constant badgering of various publishers and

Ann Quin through a willingness to live on the small amounts offered by Arts Council

grants. The various state supports which made the Sixties “experimental” novelists

financially viable will be expanded upon more within this chapter, although in terms of

a general overview it is enough to consider that an environment in which more people

had money – money which was going further - meant that the temptation for writers

who were not independently wealthy to take up better paid employment is

considerably reduced. Remembering the period in a letter to Michael Schmidt on

15/10/96, Christine Brooke-Rose recounts a most likely apocryphal story; “someone at

Sheed and Ward told me of an author who sent in a blank typescript, explaining that he

had no ribbon, but if the publisher held it up to the light he’d be able to read it”.

Perhaps a nostalgic reference to how little Sixties writers could live on, the letters of

Burns, Johnson, Ghose, Quin and Figes are nevertheless filled with comments

concerning their lack of funds. Such concerns do appear double-edged, however, as –

in spite of material stresses – these writers nevertheless managed to survive large

periods of the Sixties without recourse to secondary employment.

To return to the notion of “the Establishment”, however, it is important to note

that the organisational tendency of post-war economics was almost invariably towards

44
monopolistic, hierarchical and centralised institutions. The boom in literature

production described in section 1.1.5 emerged from a chaotic period of post-war

publishing described by Steve Holland in The Mushroom Jungle. The war brought a

huge demand for books at the same time as paper rationing severely limited supply:

“periodicals that had previously flourished became shadows of their former glory:

newspapers were down to a wispy four or six pages, and hardcover books were a

luxury” (12). An explosion of “mushroom” publishers (so called as their fly-by-night

business practices and low-quality productions feasted upon wartime conditions like a

fungus) diversified the publishing market, only to finally disappear as the 1956 printer’s

strike drove the vast majority out of business. On the other end of this strike which

marked a move into the formalised, unionised, and centralised printing industry of the

Sixties, the publishing industry too became dominated by a handful of large

corporations. In newspapers the results were most obvious: “in 1961 seven out of eight

copies of all morning papers were controlled by three groups (Beaverbrook,

Rothemere, King), while seven out of eight copies of national Sunday papers are

controlled by two of these groups (Beaverbrook and King)” (Williams, Britain in…, 19).

Penguin, Britain’s largest paperback publisher had, in 1961, over 3,500 books on its lists

which “sold 250 million copies between them [with sales] increasing that number at a

rate of 13 million a year” (Holland, 9). With publishing in the hands of so few

companies, the sense of an Establishment of literary critics (and publishers promoting

their own mutual interests against those of upstart outsiders) finds a certain economic

justification. Authors writing reviews of each other’s work and the work of their friends

at the same newspaper or publishing company was not an uncommon practice.

Writing in the editorial of 1975’s Beyond the Words, a collection of writing

aimed at encapsulating the “experimental” writers at a time when the “movement”

45
was nearing its end, Giles Gordon presents Penguin’s Writing in England Today

(published 1968, edited by Karl Miller) as a symbol of how the mainstream British

literary Establishment warps the landscape of contemporary literature to fit its own

interests.8 Against the Penguin collection, his should be “considered an antidote”,

presenting writing that mattered against a “not merely idiosyncratic [but] perverse”

selection which “omitted any writer whose abilities and inclinations were remotely

divorced from the, so called, realistic” (11). In many ways, viewing the “experimental”

novelists’ shared outlook as that of Welfare State writers against the Establishment

finds its apotheosis in these David and Goliath statements of Us vs. Them. In other

ways, it is against the backdrop of the monopolistic post-war publishing industry that

the “experimental” novelists’ importance as a group identity comes most clearly into

focus.

1.2.2: Calder and Better Books

Writing in 1996’s “anti-biography” Remake, Christine Brooke-Rose “remembers the

publishers’ parties in the late fifties and sixties, at first the thrill of being invited at all,

then quickly, the disappointment, the fatigue at the smart empty talk”, and emphasises

her “relief at leaving London literary life. Carefully not joining the Paris equivalent”

(49). It is this attitude which separates Brooke-Rose from the other writers identified as

the British “experimental” novelist group. In comparison with the withdrawn and

solitary Brooke-Rose, the other writers seem to exist in an increasingly intense circle of

literary events, political causes, and often both together as the Sixties neared its end.

Although it would be inaccurate to prescribe any centre or periphery to such activities,

in consideration of the previously discussed literary Establishment it is of note that

8
Although Beyond the Words does not feature Christine Brooke-Rose, letters between the two writers
held in the Harry Ransom Centre show that she was invited, accepted, but was unable to contribute the
section from Thru that she intended to due to her publisher stepping in to prevent it (Letter).

46
much of the group’s activities involved one publisher: John Calder. Publisher of Burns,

Quin, and one of Figes’ theoretical works (Tragedy and Social Evolution), Calder is

better known for his support of Samuel Beckett and bringing William Burroughs and

the nouveau romanciers to Britain; his willingness to take on “experimental”, difficult,

and dangerous to publish works making Calder and Boyars (co-run by Marion Boyars)

perhaps the only independent publishing company to publish nineteen Nobel

laureates.

Heir to a Scottish distilling company, Calder found himself in a secure enough

financial position to indulge his passion for literature and liberalism by starting an

independent publishing company. In an era when government censorship still dictated

the limits of literary taste, Calder positioned himself against legal limits on principle

which – like the French pornographer and publisher of Burroughs and Trocchi, Maurice

Girodias – also placed him at the cutting edge of “experimental” novel publishing

almost by default. Starting out in the 1950s, Calder took on American authors

blacklisted under the McCarthyite Smith Act which “by implication convicted people of

conspiring to overthrow the American government because of the contents of their

books” (Pursuit, 88). By the Sixties he was a tireless campaigner for civil liberties, albeit

in the rather decadent libertarian fashion of the era; wheeling a naked woman in a

wheelbarrow through the Edinburgh literary festival he began in 1962 and flyposting

equally naturist posters as adverts around London (“Calder Takes a Civil Liberty”, 135).

Paul Harris describes Calder’s role in the publishing world as one of a dying breed of

“Gentleman Publishers. They might not have exactly been gentlemen but they were

characters, in every sense of the word, utterly devoted to the call of the struggle into

print” (119). Calder was one of a small number of the “anti-Establishment”

47
establishment without whose assistance much of the “experimental” works of the

Sixties would never have been created.

As a publisher, Calder and Boyars had considerable influence and, as such, could

bring together established members of the literary scene who may be sympathetic to

the unorthodox work being produced by their authors. A guest list to a 1969 party for

Alan Burns included Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs, Magnus Magnusson, Angus

Wilson, and Frank Kermode, as well as the usual group and Burns’ other collaborators

like Charles Marowitz of the Open Space theatre. Another, earlier party to celebrate

the publication of Europe After the Rain even featured “television personalities and the

Cuban Ambassador” (Calder and Boyars, “Record…”). Burns himself had no qualms

about admitting that his “going so far out on a limb [in his writing] was partly made

possible by the backing of John Calder” (Imagination…, 92) but even Eva Figes, with

whom Calder “arranged joint readings and sessions for the public to promote a new

kind of English novel” (Pursuit, 274) became “personally friendly” with him, despite

refusing to let him publish her novels. For Ann Quin, Calder and Boyars became both a

financial and emotional support, her letters to her publishers “revealing her to be very

anxious about money, demanding, difficult, sporadic, impulsive, and seeking stability”

(Dodd) to an extent far more personal than professional in tone.

As well as book publishing, Calder was also one of the first British investors in

literary events. Beginning in 1962 with the Traverse Theatre Club to “present serious

theatre productions of a type not usually presented for economic reasons” (Marwick,

349), he in the same year launched the Edinburgh literary festival to coincide with the

already popular arts festival; the influence of which is recounted in chapter 5. Along

with a number of his authors, Calder was also a regular attendee of Better Books, the

48
only place in Britain to regularly hold “happenings”. Recalling one of Jeff Nuttall’s The

People Show pieces, Calder wrote that “it was a messy affair with pieces of raw organ

meat thrown around the room, but the point, which I have forgotten, was well-put-

over” (277). Friendly with the owner, who reserved him his own “Calder Corner” for

new “experimental” works, he eventually took over the establishment in what Victor

Herbert describes as an essentially quixotic business manoeuvre;

[Better Books] was the only London west-end bookshop that held readings and
literary activities. It was full of nineteenth century tiny interlocking rooms, cosy
for browsing, but in the end, they were the cause of his own demise… everyone
in town who was both educated and broke and who needed a few quid knew
how easy it was to steal a few books from these tiny rooms. Everyone in London
knew this… except John (128-129).

Nevertheless, Better Books became an essential meeting place for both the avant garde

cultural scene of the Sixties and the simultaneously occurring, yet only very

tangentially linked, countercultural “underground” scene.9 Alongside Jim Haynes’ Arts

Lab on Drury Lane, Better Books was a home for the boom in “experimental” theatre,

“happenings” and other physical theatre (Ansorge, 26) in spite of its small spatial

allowances. Politically, Better Books also served as Britain’s introduction to the

Situationist International in the form of 1965’s February workshops based around

Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma, A Tactical Blueprint, the closure of which was “widely

welcome” due to, amongst other things, “the smell” (Fountain, 14).

If relationships and influences between British Sixties “experimental” writers

were to be mapped out, almost all would be connected at some point through Calder.

9
The overlaps between “experimental” literature and “underground” counterculture are fewer than one
might expect. Ann Quin, as one of the only drug users amongst the group, demonstrates considerable
influences of “hippy” culture in her novels – especially Tripticks. B.S. Johnson, on the other hand,
successfully sued The Daily Mail for labelling him a “hippy”. From the counterculture’s perspective, as
Charles Shaar Murray explained during the Oz trial, “Underground literature is virtually non-existent:
Burroughs, Ginsberg and the late Jack Kerouac” (Palmer, 50) – no British authors, or even Sixties authors,
are considered.

49
It is a testimony both to Calder and Boyars’ place within the publishing industry and

equally to the publishing Establishment’s proportional lack of interest in

“experimental” material considering the overall demand for new titles. The closeness

of the “experimental” nexus is perhaps another reason for the success of writers from

non-privileged backgrounds. Ann Quin, for example, who never formally studied

literature to a university level, was nevertheless introduced through Rayner

Heppenstall to B.S. Johnson and, after dinner, joined the crowd at Better Books to hear

Nathalie Sarraute speak about the nouveau romancier theory of the novel

(Heppenstall, The Master Eccentric, 120). Snapshots of Sixties literary culture such as

this demonstrate how, with the right mix of state funding and adventurous publishers,

the formerly “elite” world of non-traditional literature could be made available to

audiences from all backgrounds, not simply those already “established” through

Oxbridge.

1.2.3: The Widening World of Education

Outside of Oxbridge, where most of the “experimental” novelists worked and wrote,

the education system was in a state of rapid expansion on an unprecedented scale,

creating a whole raft of opportunities for writers of slender means. At the core of this

growth was the 1944 Education Act which, combined with Welfare State aims and

Keynesian economic backing, led to a surge of funding into education. From an average

of 6,000 full-time teachers being trained before the war, the number more than

doubled to an average of 14,000 afterward – the demand such that an Emergency

Teacher’s Training Scheme had to be put into operation (Cole, 344). As a result the

number of teachers in primary education went from 116,820 in 1946 to 144,693 in

1960 and 180,008 in 1970 (Lowe, 216) and in secondary education went from 58,455 in

50
1946 to 131,591 in 1960 and 171,343 in 1970 (Lowe, 220). The total public expenditure

on schools grew in an equally exponential fashion, from £408 million in 1951, to £1,060

million in 1960, to £3,154 million in 1970 (Lowe, 236). During the same period

university places increased from 82 thousand to 228 thousand (Lowe, 206), with

numerous new institutions and courses opening to more effectively cater for demand.

The explosion in education impacts upon the “experimental” writers in a

number of ways. In macro terms, a more highly educated population will inevitably

bring with it an increased market for avant garde culture, especially for the sort of

novels which depict a similar non-Oxbridge intellectual sentiment as an increasing

number of cultural consumers could relate to. For the writers themselves it meant

access to the kinds of circles conducive to literary success: B.S. Johnson editing

Universities Poetry with Zulfikar Ghose and Lucifer with fellow King’s College student

Maureen Duffy, for example. It meant access for working class writers to literary

criticism’s conception of the “canon” and the traditions against which they wrote. It

meant stipends and awards such as Alan Burns becoming the University of East Anglia’s

first writer in residence and Johnson becoming the first Gregynog Arts Fellow in the

University of Wales. Universities presented spaces for Eva Figes to speak as her political

commitment to feminism and women’s writing grew. The rapid expansion of

educational places also meant that securing a teaching position was also made far

easier, with writers like B.S. Johnson and Anthony Burgess falling almost accidentally

into positions at high schools (the influence of which I have dealt with in another paper

(2011)) and Alan Burns and Christine Brooke-Rose taking up lectureship positions on

the invitation of the universities. Burns himself began his working life as part of the

Royal Army Education Corps in 1949 (Madden, 110); an experience inspiring his first

novel, Buster, and his subsequent anarchist politics. The casual attitude to taking on
51
teaching positions can be felt in a letter from Ghose to Johnson on 7th March, 1963 as

he asks whether there are “any good teaching jobs? I’ve just realised that even if I sold

the books already out, and finished two more novels this year, I still won’t have any real

income till late next year”. That what is now a career profession was considered a stop-

gap between writing income demonstrates one of the peculiarities of Sixties plenty

perhaps foreign to the twenty-first century reader.

In terms of “The Establishment”, however - that functional term for those

within British society who have reached a position in which simply by being in that

position they are granted access to power, prestige and privilege - the traditional way

by which one becomes “established” is through the halls of Oxford and Cambridge

universities. Writing in 1965’s Anatomy of Britain Today, Anthony Sampson described

the contemporary position of the universities as so;

Like dukes, Oxford and Cambridge preserve an antique way of life in the midst
of the twentieth century, and the dreaming-spires legend is supported by
tourists, the Ford Foundation, conventions of chartered accountants and
international fame. Oxford and Cambridge in 1961 provided 87 per cent of
permanent secretaries, nearly 40 per cent of members of parliament, and 71
per cent of the vice-chancellors of other universities. Eleven members of Harold
[“anti-establishment”] Wilson’s cabinet were at Oxford… The 18,000 students of
Oxbridge make up, from the outside, at least, one of the most elite elites in the
world. Less than one per cent of Britain’s population go to Oxbridge but, once
there, they are wooed by industry and government… you see, they speak the
same language. (222)

Although it is not simply the exclusive benefits that accrue around an Oxbridge degree

which lend a pallor of social injustice to the two universities’ national domination (after

all, to a “meritocratic” perspective these privileges would have been earned), it is

rather the manner in which the “mixed economy” of state and private schools in Britain

tend towards making Oxbridge an engine for the reproduction of an Established ruling

class. Fig. 10 (299) from Sampson (196) demonstrates how, from the moment of

52
entering the educational system, a British post-war child had a certain class-based

likelihood of attending Oxbridge already well established. The 1944 Education Act

which raised school leaving age to sixteen and massively expanded educational

provision did little to change the Oxbridge tendencies, according to Sampson, and “in

fact (because of the expansion of places) more public school boys are going to

Oxbridge than in the thirties” (223). It is against this background of cultural domination

that the majority of the experimental writers covered in this thesis wrote. 10

It is in the context of such an educational system that much of what has been

discussed concerning The Establishment finds its genesis – including the “anti-

establishment” feeling prevalent within traditional institutions such as the BBC and

parliament.11 Eva Figes, contributing to an “Oxford und Cambridge” edition of German

periodical Merian, writes satirically of a number of unusual aspects of the Oxford

experience including the “Oxford accent”:

Until about twenty years ago generally considered the perfect way to speak
English, and disseminated to the nation at large via the BBC. This accent was
not so much the result of an Oxford education as of the fact that the student
body at the University was made up of the sons of England’s aristocracy and
wealthy middle class. Since the early fifties it is no longer considered the most
desirable way to talk. Writers and dramatists (particularly John Osborne’s Look
Back in Anger) made it fashionable to talk with a touch of dialect, to make it
quite clear that daddy was a working man. The success of the Beatles and other
pop musicians during the sixties has made a Merseyside accent the most
fashionable of all, and this is now dominant at the BBC.

10
Anti-Oxbridge feeling may be one of the reasons that Christine Brooke-Rose distanced herself from
other writers undertaking similar experimental projects to her own, she having been educated at
Somerville College, Oxford.

11
Indeed, the early 1960s “Satire Boom” and much of the countercultural “underground” can be traced
back to Oxbridge graduates. Similarly, New Left figures like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and
Stuart Hall sit comfortably between “Establishment” Oxbridge and the revolutionary left. As with the
theory used in this thesis, any lack of subtlety involved in the categorisation of Oxbridge is here reflecting
the collective experiences of the writers (other than Brooke-Rose). The perceived exclusivity of Oxbridge
networks has a demonstrative psychological effect on uniting non-Oxbridge “experimental” writers in a
shared cause.

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The “progressive” post-war attitude is here at work in the heart of what those outside

would consider the Establishment. A “classless” accent, with flavours of Wolfe’s “Mid-

Atlantic Man”, is only bettered by the “touch of dialect” which acts as a passport to a

more legitimate and authentic background of the “working man”. The underlying

satirical content of Figes’ piece is the mismatch between the traditional Oxford accent

indicating a privileged background and the new dialectical Oxford accent indicating an

awareness of what is fashionable, and how both, once dominant at Oxford, inevitably

become dominant at the BBC as well. Oxbridge, by aligning itself with liberal attitudes,

could happily maintain its hegemony in an “anti-Establishment” climate. In one

extreme example of Oxbridge liberalism in action, the drug dealer Howard Marks who

studied at Balliol in 1968 was recruited by the Dean “merely to refrain from

participation in protests, etc, and persuade the cronies that I would inevitably attract to

do likewise [as] the problem was not drugs but left-wing revolution” (67). Policing the

fine line between meritocratic apologia and actual criticism was essential for

maintaining the “managed economy” at all levels. It is perhaps this subtle policy of

Oxford’s to use social permissiveness as a means to maintain the old order – a tolerant

Sixties paternalism – that informs so much of what is considered to be radical Sixties

culture; especially in cultural bastions dominated by Oxbridge graduates.

1.2.4: Writers and The BBC

The writer who achieved most success with the BBC – an almost exclusively Oxbridge

managed institution - also managed to have the most disagreements with the

corporation. A full account of B.S. Johnson’s trails and tribulations has been written by

Valerie Butler for the collection Re-reading B.S. Johnson. “Despite his best efforts to

convince them otherwise, the BBC continued to place his work, when they played it at

54
all, in the Third Programme [the most “high cultural” of the three stations] Johnson did

not view his work in this way at all” (117). For Johnson, the connection between his

writing and “the truth” was such that his work should be considered suitable for a

popular audience (a sentiment shared by Eva Figes concerning her radio play Bedsitter

in 1969), although for the Oxbridge paternalists such a programming decision was

inconceivable. The process of disillusion Johnson underwent in his dealings with the

BBC can be readily summarised in an angry jotting from his 1959 Notebook 3 in which,

next to the fateful reminder “Write BBC for job” he scrawls “AH HA! – 1971”; the bitter

future laughing at the naïve past. In spite of his many disagreements with media

outlets, however, Johnson made a number of BBC documentaries as well as working for

the Welsh wing of ITV, HTV, on the forty minute film Fat Man on a Beach, which was

broadcast after his death in 1973 and remains widely remembered. In radio, too,

Johnson succeeded in breaking new ground, having his novel Christy Malry’s Own

Double-Entry read twice, from cover to cover, on Radio London – “something of a coup

of the kind in which Bryan has specialised”, wrote Rayner Heppenstall of it in 1973 (The

Master Eccentric, 108).

For all of its institutional thinking, the BBC had already been long established by

the Sixties as a space for writers to find creative work. Rayner Heppenstall traces the

post-war years in his memoir Portrait of a Professional Man in which, although “in the

public arts, things had looked up greatly after Hitler’s war… the writer was still a

nobody in this most Philistine of civilised countries… I was not the first, nor was I quite

to be the last, writer to whom joining the BBC seemed a possible answer to a

recognised dilemma, the crucial financial need for a second job” (83). As his memoir

goes on to recount, however, the BBC’s “old boy’s network” way of operating was

increasingly falling foul of the centralising, meritocratising and technologizing demands

55
of the Sixties. The mode of television and radio, only thirty years earlier the kind of

exciting new medium in which experiment was called for and high-brow risks were

taken, was now falling into recognisable patterns of programme-making and audience

expectation. Through clouds of whiskey vapours and cigarette smoke, the dilettante

likes of Rayner Heppenstall were evacuated in favour of professional television and

radio producers.

The BBC, like Oxbridge, took to liberalising during the Sixties in a similar “touch

of dialect” manner, featuring both “anti-Establishment” satirical comedies like That

Was The Week That Was in the early decade and Monty Python’s Flying Circus towards

the end, and more “kitchen-sink” sitcoms based around working class life such as

Steptoe and Son and Till Death Do Us Part which recognised “the inadequacy of old

discourses… even while it embodies them” (White and Mundy, 114). The Director

General of the BBC in the Sixties (literally holding the position from 1960 to 1969) was

Sir Hugh Greene, the key liberalising force who reputedly “would actually congratulate

programme-makers for eliciting ‘another letter from [Clean-Up TV campaigner] Mary

Whitehouse’” (Ben Thompson, 7). Anthony Sampson described his policy in the sense

that “while accepting that the BBC must be impartial between Right and Left, he insists

that it cannot be neutral between Right and Wrong” and, as such, was vehemently

anti-racist, keen to undermine elitism where he found it and never “disguised his

contempt for ‘the commercial monster’” (650) of independent broadcasting. As with a

lot of the paternalist tendencies buried beneath Sixties aspirations of social democracy,

however, a willingness to engage with class difference and age difference did not sit

comfortably with a desire to create something aesthetically different in the

“experimental” sense – especially with a radical message attached. In many ways the

BBC’s allocation of material according to whether it was Radio One populist or Third
56
Programme “high-brow” did more to uphold aesthetic distinctions than democratise

them.

The tendency of the BBC to create its own traditions was perceptibly noted by

Eva Figes in her 1971 article for the Listener, “Dreaming”, in which she comments that

During my school days radio meant very much what television means to my
children today… Nowadays my listening habits, like most people’s, are very
different, but when I glance through Radio Times I find it hard to believe that I
am now a grown-up woman with children of my own: Brain of Britain, Any
Questions, Woman’s Hour, The Archers, Desert Island Disks!... Please, somebody
tell me I’m dreaming. But there is no mistake, and even one of the old [Twenty
Questions] panel members survives. (531)

Although each of these formats continue to be made and continue to receive a

considerable listenership to this day, Figes approaches the subject from the opposite

perspective and suggests that BBC radio’s timeless qualities essentially leave the

medium entrenched in the past. For a writer whose aesthetic philosophy involved the

constant reinvention of form to more accurately capture the cultural and social

conditions of the present, the BBC’s unchanging content appears as the broadcast

equivalent of the Nineteenth Century Novel: out-dated and reactionary. Typical of

British ambivalence towards the BBC, however, Figes’ criticisms nevertheless didn’t

discourage her from submitting comedy sketches to Woman’s Hour, including a

particularly funny one about “Womb Envy” submitted on 21st April, 1969 (Letter to

Deborah Rogers).

Calder and Boyars, in spite of attracting the occasional television personality to

parties and readings, also had trouble encouraging the BBC to cover “experimental”

culture. Calder laments in Pursuit of the numerous occasions when readings and Better

Books “happenings” would have made entertaining radio had the BBC responded to his

requests. Marion Boyars too wrote a half-pleading, half-passive-aggressive request to

57
the BBC that they cover Alan Burns’ “experimental” play Palach, produced by Charles

Marowitz and the Open Space Theatre, arguing that “French T.V. have been to record

some of it and there is vast interest from European countries, but strangely enough

none of the British arts programmes were attracted by the voluminous discussion and

reviews that the play generated” (22nd November, 1970). Even when BBC policy was

firmly in favour of an “anti-Establishment” camp, if such a thing could be said to exist,

the “experimental” was still subject to institutional disinterest. The ambiguous nature

of “The Establishment” as a term is embodied in such disagreements as to what exactly

constitutes the “new” and the “traditional”. Even Christine Brooke-Rose’s fairly

conventional attempt at a radio play, “A Séance at the Seminar” (in which academics

conjure the poet of Beowulf only to end up arguing with him over historical details)

was turned down on grounds of “difficulty” (“BBC Radio Play”). As much as the BBC

could be a progressive force in the Sixties when it came to challenging outdated modes

and manners, challenging its audience’s cultural sensibilities was alien to its ideological

framework.

1.2.5: The Arts Council

The most important direct source of funding for the group as writers, outside that

gained directly from publishing contracts, came from the greatly expanding Arts

Council. Another engine of Welfare State expansion, the Arts Council emerged from the

Second World War where, faced by a need for culture and entertainment in the face of

a war economy, the first public money was spent on the arts in Britain since the days of

court patronage. According to Sir Hugh Willatt’s 1971 report on the Arts Councils’ “first

25 years”, the funding “proved to be startlingly productive of quality. This was the first

wartime discovery. The second was the extent and ardour of public response” (3).

58
Elsom’s account of the Council’s development describes how during “the first ten years

[the grants] were small, tied to specific projects” (127), from 1956 to 1964 “grants from

the government rose steadily… this period was particularly fruitful and optimistic”

(128) and then, following Harold Wilson’s appointment of Jennie Lee as Minister for

the Arts “whose declared purpose was to extend the role of arts in society” (128), the

budget effectively doubled and Britain began its first series of long-term state

investments in cultural production. Fig. 11 (300), from Willatt’s report indicates how, in

terms of percentages, the funding allocated to novelists in general was relatively small.

However, unlike theatre or musical productions, the Arts Council grants went direct to

the writers and, not usually being attached to specific projects, could happily be spent

entirely upon living costs – providing valuable writing time.

Although a sense of “the Establishment” did still exist within the Arts Council

(Charles Marowitz staged numerous attacks upon its theatre policies) the writer-led

constitution of the literature funding panels meant that the “experimental” novelists

were actually in a good position to secure funding, and very often did. B.S. Johnson in

particular “had the knack of applying for things and getting them… but equally when

he served on committees like that he would spend endless time trying to advance the

cause of particular writers, [trying to get them] onto the committees, or into the

fellowships, or to get the grants” (Coe, 272). These writers especially included “Eva

Figes, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, and Giles Gordon” (Coe, 272). An Arts Council grant of

£1,200 for Zulfikar Ghose held at the Ransom Centre reads “Your Sponsor for this

award was Mr B.S. Johnson”; a common sight for grant recipients which must have

improved Johnson’s standing considerably. Giles Gordon, American friend of the group,

also succeeded in becoming “a member of the Arts Council’s Literature Panel during its

first four years and was a member of the management committee of the Society of
59
Authors” (Booth, 651). Calder and Boyars’ writers did especially well, Calder being able

to trade off his eye for Nobel winners against more “mainstream” competition. The

Arts Council represents perhaps the quintessential Welfare State support for

“experimental” literature during this period: promoting new art as a social good was at

the core of these writers’ messages, whilst their usual weakness of commercial viability

became a positive boon as more commercially successful writers would be judged to

have far less need of grant money. The Council even receives a tongue-in-cheek attack

from the right-wing protagonist of Ghose and Johnson’s unpublished satire, Prepar-a-

Tory;

A recent publication by the Arts Council has come to my hands, in which I read
that the Arts Council receives a state grant equivalent to what it cost to build
four miles of the M1 motorway. It just goes to show why we have bad roads
(47).

The awards granted to “experimental” writers were many. In 1969 Johnson was

awarded a £2,000 grant – “the second he had received in just over two years” (Coe,

270). Alan Burns also received two bursaries, one in 1969 and one in 1973, as well as

benefitting from the Arts Council’s funding of the Open Space theatre when Marowitz

staged his play Palach. Ann Quin was granted a Harkness Fellowship to travel to

America, a D.H. Lawrence award and an Arts Council grant which, as it was perceived to

have been spent on a two month long transcontinental bender, John Calder blamed for

her death (Pursuit, 276). Apart from direct Writer’s Bursaries, the Council also used a

considerable amount of its funding to promote local projects around the country. Of

these, the Greater London Arts Association funded a project co-edited by Johnson and

Margaret Drabble called London Consequences in 1972 in which writers including

Rayner Heppenstall, Melvyn Bragg, Eva Figes, and Alan Burns each received the

manuscript, contributed a chapter, and then passed it on to the next writer until

60
completion. In the spirit of Cold War competition, B.S. Johnson and Anthony Burgess

went on paid-for trips beyond the iron curtain, to Hungary and Russia respectively. In

the second part of his memoirs, You’ve Had Your Time, Burgess even talks of receiving

British state funding to hold literary parties at his flat (149).

Considering the difficulties that a career in “experimental” literature entailed

during the Sixties, both emotional and financial, the Arts Council stands as a recurring

beacon of hope within these writers’ careers. Far more than money, the awards meant

validation from peers – something more valuable than the opinions of Establishment

critics – and once each award is won it can be seen dutifully appearing upon the

writers’ “bio” for future appearances in collections or in the press. In Johnson’s 1970

Notebook 8 there is evidence of how defensive he could be around the subject of the

Arts Council. Reading an attack on “bursaried writers” in the Times Literary

Supplement, he writes, “Attack English lecturers – public money spent on bad ones

(none below the efficiency bar) as TLS attacked [us]” (50). The extent to which Johnson

lashes out here considering that he was usually a defender of state education (even

when it did come to his nemeses the English lecturers) is testimony to the lifeline which

the Council bursaries represented and how wrapped up they became with social value.

A letter by Ann Quin on the 25th October 1969 demonstrates the kind of living

standards from which the grants offered respite;

Terrible depressions, almost suicidal at times. Mother thinks it’s ‘the pill’. I put it
down partly to lack of money (not able to buy even a bottle of whiskey when I
want!) but then the other day heard that I’ll be receiving an Arts Council award
of £1,000 – and of course felt pretty high for the day, but that aint stopped the
depressions!

61
1.2.6: Public Politics and Pay Disputes

Although each of the “experimental” writers were committed to a politics of writing in

their own respective ways, they also took to political organisation increasingly as the

“long Sixties” moved into its later, more turbulent years. By 1973, B.S. Johnson and

Alan Burns were collaborating on trade union filmmaking and had both published

terrorism-themed, politically divisive novels (the journey to which is more fully

described in my paper “Cell of One”(2014)), Eva Figes is an almost full-time political

essayist and Christine Brooke-Rose is dealing with the aftermath of May ’68 in her Paris

lectureship. In reaching this point however, there are a number of political causes that

Burns, Quin, Figes, and Johnson share (Brooke-Rose already having left for Paris) which

would appear to cement them as a “group” with shared interests, even if they could

not be considered an “aesthetic movement”.

The first of the political groupings which emerged from these writers was

Writers Reading: an attempt to bring writers and the public together through

discussions and readings of new work. Rayner Heppenstall, attending a meeting at Alan

Burns’ house where the group was proposed on 31st July 1969, was himself reticent – “I

don’t think it will work” – which led to “Bryan Johnson [seeming] bent on needling me”

(The Master Eccentric, 26). As a political commitment, Writers Reading can be seen to

emerge fairly effortlessly from the pre-existing literary scene surrounding these writers.

Johnson would be provided a platform for his speech-making during readings and

Burns would more publically commit to his growing “disgust with… Literature which is

not life but only marks on paper. Plus a political rejection of bourgeois art as a self-

indulgence irrelevant to the struggle for social justice” (“Essay”, 64). Having attended

anti-Vietnam protests together in 1968 (a year of dramatic social upheaval across much

62
of the world) the decision to start Writers Reading – for Johnson and Burns at least –

may have simply been to make visible the politics already latent within their work at a

time when public political commitment and protest shook the country. It may have

been for this reason that Johnson had such a problem with Quin’s contribution as

Burns describes in Coe’s biography:

At this [Writers Reading] ICA event, we all gave our readings and it was all going
in a very jolly way and then Ann Quin’s turn came and she did her Quin thing,
that is to say she came onto the stage and just sat there and looked at people,
she wouldn’t say a goddamn word! She just stared, she either implied or she
actually stated that we sort of ‘think-communicate’… which I was really quite
intrigued by, it seemed to be sort of radical and provocative and interesting,
whereas Bryan was simply pissed off, he was furious with her. (405)

Differences between Johnson’s Old Left spirit of militant working class stoicism, Burns’

New Left anarchism and Quin’s New Age “happening” (in the style of the contemporary

“experimental” theatre boom) are made obvious when placed on the same stage and –

considering the “experimental” writers tendency to attack aesthetic choices they

disliked – probably contributed to the downfall of the Writers Reading project.

More politically effective than Writers Reading, in that it eventually came into

law in 1979, was the campaign for Public Lending Right. Considering the contemporary

British reading culture’s allegiance to libraries, this campaign to secure payments for

writers when their books were publically lent could make a significant difference to the

financially insecure “experimental” writers. The proliferation and popularity of libraries

had not gone unnoticed by writers. Elspeth Davie, contributing to Beyond the Words

writes about standing “outside our main public library on a Saturday afternoon…

fascinated to see the number of people who came striding up, books under their arms,

read the CLOSED notice several times with disbelief, and finally turned away looking

incredibly gloomy” (88). More politically targeted than the Writers Reading project, the

63
campaign for Public Lending Right drew a much larger group together. Talking of the

make-up of this group, however, Maureen Duffy describes how B.S. Johnson again felt

left out: “he was involved in the initial campaign for Public Lending Rights, but I think

he found it quite difficult that it was basically being run by a coven of women”

(Seddon). Compared to the reasoned and patient tones in which Eva Figes writes about

the subject, however, Johnson’s sputtering outrage may have come across as overly-

abrasive for a political lobbying group anyway. In a letter to Zulfikar Ghose about the

matter (quoted by Ghose in “Bryan”), Johnson wrote “bollocks to librarians, too – of all

the ponces who feast off the dead body of Literature, the carrion who feast on the

corpses of good men, writers, pay us fuck all and go out to lunch every day of the

working week… librarians are the worst” (27). As Eva Figes describes the dynamic of

political groups with Johnson involved,

Bryan’s stance was always aggressive, even belligerent, whether the cause was
modernity in literature or money, his other great obsession. I remember him
throwing paper darts into an audience to campaign for Public Lending Right. I
remember sitting next to him at a very rowdy and enjoyable Annual General
Meeting of the Society of Authors where he called for the instant resignation of
the entire Committee of Management because of their handling of the PLR
issue (“B.S. Johnson”, 71).

Coe too writes of Johnson’s attack on the Society of Authors, pointing out that it “took

place not long after his return from Hungary in 1973” (where he engaged in sufficient

political arguments to at one point label himself communist), and that, according to

Gordon Williams, the attack was not about handling of Public Lending Right but rather

a survey released by the Society “which revealed that writers’ earnings had, on

average, dropped substantially since the mid-1960s” (347). Whichever was the reason

for the attack, a brief correspondence with Alan Burns indicates the fairly spontaneous

nature of the guerrilla action. Burns himself only joined the Society on 1 st July (the

AGM occurred on the 26th), writing to Johnson and offering, “if you need my help in

64
overthrowing and trampling on the old guard please let me know”. Johnson, seemingly

going on a recruitment spree in response, must have been let down to receive Burns’

letter on the 4th:

Dear Bryan, If you’re urging folks to join the Soc of A with a view to them taking
part in the AGM it’s worth your knowing that the processing of new members
takes so long that those applying after 30th June are excluded….I had a word
with Maureen Duffy and she agreed there was naught to be done.

Perhaps due to Johnson’s inability to recruit sufficient insurrectionaries in time, or

perhaps due to the brusqueness of his tone in delivering his demand – Gordon

Williams describes “not being prepared for the violence of his tone, or for the attacks

on individual Committee members to be so personal” (Coe, 347) – the uprising was not

a success.

Behind Johnson’s bouts of early 1970s militancy, however, there remain

important causes which were fought for by other writers in less direct actions. Eva

Figes, whose essay writing was much in demand following the success of Patriarchal

Attitudes in 1970, contributed a passionate piece to the newly-formed magazine New

Humanist on “Public Larceny Right” in 1972 which argued that, by refusing to pay

writers for the use of their books, the state was essentially funding a public library

system operating against the national cultural interest. The letter to New Humanist’s

editor, Christopher Macy, to which the article was attached, told him to “send copies to

the Publisher’s Association, Society of Authors, and the Bookseller’s Association and

see what happens”. Her commitment to this cause was such that, by 1978, she even

included a plea to readers to support Public Lending Right printed inside her book Little

Eden, saying that “most people who read my books borrow them freely from public

libraries and do not buy copies. As a result, my earnings from them are small and, like

most authors, I find it impossible to live on my literary income alone” (5).

65
 Considering that, as we have seen, it is in part due to the post-war economics of

Britain that the “experimental” writers could exist as an avant garde whilst materially

supporting themselves, the call for a Public Lending Right takes on a totemic quality as

the cause behind which post-war writers could rally. As much as the “anti-

Establishment” protests that the group engaged in were meaningful in an ideological

sense, the campaign for Public Lending Right serves to remind us that the writers

themselves were in an uncomfortable financial position. The belief that one could

make a sustainable living from novel writing as a profession, however, also

demonstrates a certain unique Sixties position. As the democratic socialist post-war

society “progressed,” the “experimental” writers bringing novel writing into the

modern era believed in fighting their corner in the “managed economy” in the manner

of any other profession or industry.

1.2.7: Feminism: A Revolution in Progress

When considering the 1960s as a zenith moment for the “permissive society”, as later

moral panics would frame it, there exists a distinct tension in terms of the status of

women within such a society. The reforms brought about during the Sixties - the 1967

Abortion Act, 1969 Divorce Reform Act, and the popularisation of the Pill being the

most notable examples – can be read as one aspect of the overall “progressive”,

technology-driven context of the decade. There is, however, wrapped up in this liberal

attitude, a whole series of sentiments which, rather than improve the situation of

women, served only to bring to the surface the internal problems of patriarchal

discourse as it was internalised by church, state, education, healthcare and the popular

imagination. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Betty Friedan’s The

Feminine Mystique (1963) may have laid the groundwork for the “Second Wave” of

66
feminist politics in the early 1970s, but it was the cumulative experiences of the Sixties

which generated the grassroots movements which swept the country. Eva Figes, whose

feminist work Patriarchal Attitudes (1970) was second only to Germaine Greer’s The

Female Eunuch (1970) in popularity, is uniquely positioned for a study of post-war

developments as concerns the “experimental” novel – as appears in chapter 3 – yet

tensions around gender politics are apparent throughout all of the writers’ works.

Whether it is B.S. Johnson’s anxiety-ridden chauvinism or Ann Quin’s violent sexual

imagery, the feminist cause of the 1970s is prefigured by the contradictions of 1960s

“permissiveness” and the terms upon which each writer’s personal struggles to

support themselves were waged.

Looking back on the 1960s, feminist scholars have indicated how the

technocratic post-war consensus was especially capable of maintaining the

“Establishment” as far as gender politics was concerned. Ann Oakley’s 1974 study

Housewife describes how although the increase in women in the labour force from 27%

in 1939 to 38% in 1974 “certainly represents changes in women’s roles… the extent of

the change is often overestimated” (59). Women remained consistently and

dramatically underrepresented in government and the professions, whilst the much-

vaunted “greater variety in premarital sexual experience was in all probability confined

to a relatively small urban and largely college-educated group” (48). For the working

classes, Richard Hoggart’s 1950s presentation of a staunchly conservative sexual

morality remained the norm. From such a perspective, the “permissive” legislation of

the Sixties also takes on a new meaning. As Jane Lewis describes the situation as

regards divorce law;

the strands of opinion favouring deregulation that began to make themselves

heard in the mid-1960s, whilst apparently reflecting the changes in behaviour,

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 [largely] represented the outcome of a long struggle to reconcile traditional
views about marriage… with the implications of the increased use of artificial
contraception and changes in the position of women. (50)

While it may have been productive for social conservatives to retroactively frame

Sixties liberalisation as a move towards the empowerment of women (especially when

faced with the demands of 1970s feminism), many of the changes can be considered a

necessary concession for the maintenance of patriarchal order.

Considering the position of women in the Sixties is essential to understanding

the dynamics of the “experimental” novelists both as a group and within their

contemporary society. Compare how Alan Burns’ flâneur –esque wandering impacts

upon his found material collages like Babel and the fact Eva Figes was limited to

working in “short periods. Sometimes not more than an hour a day… when the children

go to school” (The Imagination on Trial, 39). This comparison may allow us to position

her dense, intricate internal-monologue prose within a relevant social context of

increasing single-parenthood. More palpable, however, are the routine examples of

how little Sixties “progressive” attitudes really impacted women’s lives. Brooke-Rose’s

mother, on hearing her daughter was offered a lectureship at a Paris university,

responded by telling her “not to go. Why? Because if you get a job he [her husband]

won’t support you… If I had listened to her at every stage I would never have done

anything” (Remake, 29). Equally condemning is Rayner Heppenstall’s description of a

party at which “a small black man spent the evening pawing one of the women after

another”, one of whom was Eva Figes, to which the only comment made was that “his

behaviour was ‘red-blooded’” (The Master Eccentric, 50). Heppenstall’s quiet

disapproval at the situation (unhelpfully mingled with his racial prejudices)

nevertheless fails to make an appearance a few days later when he finds out that “Eva

is publishing a Women’s Lib. book, having been deserted by the father of her children”

68
(68). The implication that it was Figes’ personal failure to maintain her marriage that

led her to write Patriarchal Attitudes, rather than a society in which casual molestation

is routine, perhaps indicates the limits of Sixties liberalism and its conception of gender

politics.

Nigel Fountain, who traces the roots of feminist periodicals such as Spare Rib

through the “underground” press of the Sixties and their problematic discourse of

sexual liberation, writes that “Greer, together with Eva Figes whose Patriarchal

Attitudes was also a key influence, remained resolutely detached from the upsurge”

(107) when it came to grass-roots feminism in the early 1970s. This did not, however,

prevent both of these writers from engaging in a great amount of political journalism

and essay-writing work and an increasing amount of public speaking – being involved

as writers if not as political activists. The 1978 Virago edition of Patriarchal Attitudes

features a glowing new introduction in which Figes describes the “massive postbag

from all over the country [which] told me that thousands, perhaps millions of women

had the same chip [on their shoulder]” (7) and how once “Women’s workshops sprang

up all over the country; almost every college had its feminist group, and women’s

associations of long standing and of all kinds suddenly joined in the growing chorus

demanding women’s rights” (8) the sexually-orientated changes of the Sixties

expanded such that by 1975 Labour passed the Sex Discrimination Act making it illegal

to discriminate on grounds of gender. Whereas the Sixties recognised “women’s

changing role” (as it was often phrased), it is only when faced with the wave of feminist

activism in the Seventies that the law officially recognised the distinctness and

essential inferiority of this “role” to be a problem deeply rooted in a discriminatory

society. When looking at the “experimental” novel’s ideological content then, and its

essentially ambiguous response to contemporary social conditions, it must be

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remembered that the great unspoken frustrations given voice by feminism did not at

that time even have the language by which to express ideas. In a society where the

word “sexism” is still an obscure neologism, bringing gender politics to life through

fiction was one of the few ways to successfully communicate discontent.

1.2.8: Anthony Burgess: a Case Study in Influence

To draw to a close this section on how the social conditions of the Sixties shaped the

experience of “experimental” novelists as people, it is worthwhile to consider the

networks of influence by which “experimental” techniques operated in the manner

Bray, Gibbons and McHale describe: as vanguards leading forward the novel as a form.

Throughout this study there will be numerous examples given of writers influenced by

and in turn influencing Sixties “experimental” writing. These include those like Zulfikar

Ghose and Maureen Duffy who were close to the writers being studied, counter-

cultural figures like Jeff Nuttall and Alexander Trocchi, previous generations of

“experimenters” like Rayner Heppenstall, those who, like Brigid Brophy and Tom

Phillips, made unique singular contributions (In Transit and A Humument respectively),

the international influences from the nouveau romanciers to the Beats, and those

writers who innovated in the novel form whilst maintaining mainstream popularity

such as John Fowles and D.M. Thomas. As was discussed above, and as studies like

Francis Booth’s demonstrate, to approach the Sixties “experimental” novel from an

aesthetic perspective is to encounter a huge amount of material with very little internal

consistency. By approaching certain writers who share a certain outlook in relation to

the period the project not only becomes manageable, but the patterns recognised can

then be made visible within other writers’ trajectories.

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 One such writer whose path regularly crosses those of the writers in this study,

who championed their writing and shared a commitment to the development of the

novel form, and who himself – in novels like M/F and Napoleon Symphony – attempted

his own form of “experiment”, was Anthony Burgess. Included in Giles Gordon’s

Beyond the Words anthology, Burgess is the only writer also included in Karl Miller’s

1968 Writing in England Today, against which Gordon’s project was set. It was against

his own ability to write “experimentally” and reach a large audience that Burgess

viewed the rest of the “best-sellers deliberately manqué” (“Foreword”, 19) within the

collection; suggesting that, for all his greater sales, they represented greater

authenticity. “I greatly admired the books of B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin,” he writes,

“not only for their willingness to try new things but also for their firmly traditional

virtues”; character, plot, mimesis, and realistic motivations. Burgess’ wider

geographical and historical scope – he suggests England has “many reviewers but few

critics” (19) – demonstrates a sympathy with the “experimental” writers’ view of the

novel form as essentially a medium in need of progression which is being doomed to

irrelevance through the conservative nature of the literary “Establishment”.

Burgess’ output during the Sixties is fairly traditional in form and content. Even

the exceptional A Clockwork Orange (1961) was conceived primarily as science-fiction

which was at that time still considered separate to the “literary” novel. His real

exploration of “experimental” forms occurs around the end of the “Long Sixties”. The

linguistically adventurous M/F (1971) represents “an attempt to make a comic

structuralist novel, in which the real hero… is Claude Levi-Strauss” (telegram), and the

epic-scale Napoleon Symphony (1974) is an attempt to write the story of Napoleon

through the form of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. Burgess was nevertheless keenly

up-to-date in his journalistic and personal reading habits. A perceptive early review of
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Johnson’s (later disowned) Travelling People demands of writers “a greater and greater

concern with technique” with which he credits Johnson, if only on the proviso that now

that he “has a fine set of instruments: he must… set about making something with

them” (Yorkshire Post, 4). Burgess’ 1967 book-length study of the contemporary novel,

The Novel Now, conceived as a guide to literature students, demonstrates a wide

knowledge of what is occurring both across continents and within Britain itself – far

more than Miller’s collection does, for instance. The breadth of Burgess’ range perhaps

being most clearly demonstrated by an article on “flower language” which appeared in

the sixth issue of “underground” magazine Oz and which presents a linguistic analysis

of its burgeoning hippy readership’ s speech patterns. An eccentric yet highly

accomplished figure of working class origins himself, it is writers like Burgess who

provide the exception to the rule concerning the literary Establishment; positive

reviews of “experimental” works being mostly limited to such originals.

In Burgess’ personal life he appears far closer to Christine Brooke-Rose than the

others. She appears a number of times in his biography You’ve Had Your Time, in which

he describes her as having “beaten the nouveau romanciers at their own game” (261).

His familiarity with her work was such that, having a dog which could apparently

understand the word “out”, even “when it was merely spelt”, and responded with

“hysterical ecstasy” (18), he resorted to using her name instead on account of her 1964

novel which took the word for its title. Whether the dog learned to associate the words

“Christine Brooke-Rose” with walkies is left unreported. B.S. Johnson, alongside whom

Burgess appears in 1971’s Penguin Modern Stories 7, presented more of a challenge to

the author; “I don’t want to talk to Bryan about the novel,” he reputedly once said “he

has views about it” (The Imagination on Trial, 93). Nevertheless, a manuscript copy of

Johnson’s novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry appears in the International

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Anthony Burgess Foundation archive, suggesting that Burgess had intimate access to

the work prior to its publication (the main character had yet to be changed from “Xtie”

to “Christie”, for example). According to Eva Figes, it was also only on Burgess’ say-so

that her first novel Equinox was published by Faber and Faber (The Imagination on

Trial, 34). Based upon just these impressions one can begin to have a sense of how

Burgess and acclaimed authors like him could make a dramatic impact in furthering

commercially unappealing “experimental” writing in the climate of a profit-driven

publishing industry. Just as the “Establishment” exists largely as a functional term – a

means of generalising which will inevitably breed numerous exceptions – the barrier

between “mainstream” and “experimental” is also breached by authors such as

Burgess. There remains however, even within Burgess’ own writing on the subject, a

sense in which these writers were particularly special, particularly innovative, and

particularly “experimental”.

1.3: The Death of Keynsianism

1.3.1: Keynesianism versus Neoliberalism

In drawing together a brief survey of how British post-war economic conditions framed

the “experimental” novel as a recognisable mode, a number of issues have been raised

which would lend such works a distinctness from other, comparable texts. Some of

these issues are contemporary; comparisons with the nouveau romanciers must

account for the differences between a book-buying French public and a book-

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borrowing British public raised by Birch, for example. One key issue on which historical

conditions present an opportunity for differentiation, however, is how these writers fit

the concept of “postmodernism” conceived as a late-twentieth century mode of being

and presentation. Literary tropes of the kind identified by Patricia Waugh, Linda

Hutcheon and Brian McHale are certainly visible in many of these texts, although the

kinds of readings which subsequently emerge concerning metanarratives, history and

irony seem at times almost antithetical to the “progressive” project on which these

writers embarked. The reason for this, I argue, can be seen more readily when

considering the social theorists of “postmodernity” such as David Harvey and Fredric

Jameson. The subtitle of Jameson’s own study, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism, highlights the kind of socioeconomic context that Harvey’s The

Condition of Postmodernity unpacks in regard to urban geography; that the

“postmodern” appears, like the majority of studies that use the term, around the

1980s and 1990s. Where the Sixties represented the triumph of the Welfare State,

“managed economy”, and Keynesianism, these decades represent the high water-mark

of deregulation, free markets and Neoliberalism. The free-floating market deregulation

of neoliberalism is often considered a major influence on the ideological outlook of

postmodernism and it is this aspect which distinguishes it from the progressive,

forward-looking, Space Aged “experimental” writers.

Comparing the “postmodern” and the “experimental” is not simply an exercise

in transhistorical categorisation, however, but importantly sets the limits to the “long

Sixties” as the annus horribilis of 1973. The post-war economy, driven by an urgent

need to rebuild infrastructure and a heightened class-consciousness placing the Labour

Party into power, turned to the economic policies of Keynes for an answer. His belief

that “the outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to
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provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and

incomes” (Keynes, 233), provided motivation for the Welfare State which, in turn, was

validated by increasing economic prosperity. In 1973, however, the British economy

was struck by both a burst property price bubble (Fig. 12 (301) (Harvey, Condition of

Postmodernity, 146)) and the international Oil Crisis (Fig. 13, 301). The market crash

would cast a long shadow over the subsequent Seventies and “since Keynes was…

accredited with the theoretical rationale for the managed economy… it was natural

that he should be blamed when it all appeared to go wrong in the 1970s” (Middleton,

23). In place of Keynes, economists increasingly turned to theorists such as Friedman

and Hayek – later to become known as the architects of neoliberalism – who preached

“strong individual private property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely

functioning markets and free trade” which, formulated as the highest moral as well as

economic good, demanded of “the state [that it] use its monopoly of the means of

violence to preserve these freedoms at all costs” (Harvey, A Brief…, 64). Following the

“economic miracle” forced upon Chile by Pinochet’s 1974 coup and subsequent

dictatorship – in which a neoliberal dismantling of the state created large profits for

global capital – the Thatcher and Reagan governments would help to accelerate

neoliberalism’s rise to global hegemony. 1973 marks the point at which politicians and

economists began turning away from praising a “managed” economy in favour of the

“freedom of the markets”.

Although it would take the depression-laden, politically tumultuous decade of

the Seventies to fully bring neoliberalism into prominence, the ideological commitment

of theorists like Friedman and Hayek to libertarian values placed them in a certain

uncomfortable alliance with a lot of the New Left thinking emerging in the Sixties.

Theodore Roszak, for example, whose 1969 book Making of a Counter-Culture was the
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fullest academic attempt to grasp the new politics of the Sixties (albeit American-

based), argued throughout for the end of a managed economy or, as he described it,

the “technocracy”. “The prime strategy of the technocracy… is to level life down to a

standard of so-called living that technical expertise can cope with – and then, on that

false and exclusive basis, to claim an intimidating omnipotence over us by its monopoly

of the experts” (12). In a similar fashion, although more aware of the subtleties

involved in such an argument, Marcuse’s popular book One-Dimensional Man argued

against the homogenisation of life under the post-war consensus. In Chapter 6 this

recuperation of anti-Establishment feeling into neoliberalism (and the transition from a

forward-looking “experimental” outlook into an ironic “postmodern” one) is further

investigated in relation to Christine Brooke-Rose’s experiences of the ultimate New Left

moment – Paris, May ’68. For the moment, however, it is important to remember that

reading an unconscious proto-Thatcherism in those criticising the post-war consensus

would be to project history backwards from the present, rather than to work from the

context outwards and to impose “postmodern” values onto writers in the British Sixties

is to fall foul of a similar conceit.

In fact, the arguments against “technocracy” and the homogeneity of a

managed economy appear in many “anti-Establishment” writers in a similar fashion as

they do with the “experimental” novelists. The kind of criticisms made by B.S. Johnson

in Albert Angelo, for example, demand increased Welfare State spending; “if the

government wanted better education it could be provided for easy enough, so I must

conclude, again, that they specifically want the majority of children to be only partially-

educated” (176). In a similar fashion, Eva Figes’ proposals for an increase in women’s

economic self-determination are – in the manner of many of her contemporary

feminists – centred around state provision as well as legal measures. The conflicts
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between unions and government-supported industry which became ubiquitous during

the Seventies were in such stark contrast to the situation of the Sixties that prominent

New Left historian Ralph Miliband was confident in attacking unions for wanting

“promising youngsters from the working classes to ‘rise to the top’” (289) and, in doing

so, using their strength “to contain and discipline their members” (370) rather than

supporting them as a class. Looking back on the cultural industries, Raymond Williams

too describes how “that old friend the ‘mixed economy’” was most often used as

“pressure to reduce the public sector” (“Culture and Technology”, 126). The democratic

socialist post-war ideology which, as was earlier argued, frames the “experimental” as

a term and is positioned as “anti-Establishment,” is in total opposition to neoliberal

conceptions of “freedom” as “liberty”. Rather, “freedom” is provided through

democratic state structures and the problems with these structures lie in the fact that

they are not democratic enough. In order to understand what happens to writing at the

end of the “long Sixties”, grasping 1973 and the “Death of Keynesianism” is essential.

1.3.2: The End of the Experiment

Remarking on the Conservative victory of 1970, Zulfikar Ghose wrote to B.S. Johnson,

“What happened to the Labour Party? I notice that one of Heath’s first

pronouncements was to start selling arms to South Africa again. The dark ages are

approaching, mate” (22/6/70). This was not a singular opinion about the direction in

which Britain was moving. As Francis Wheen describes the situation in his study of the

Seventies, Strange Days Indeed, the widespread faith in technological progression was

coming to be replaced by a “golden age of paranoia”. Right-wing commentators like

Terry Goldsmith were predicting total social collapse, his 1971 book Can Britain

Survive? predicting that “the social system most likely to emerge is best described as

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feudal. People will gather round whichever strong men can provide the basic

necessities” (Wheen, 8). The National Theatre was by 1973 staging The Party, “a three-

hour Trotskyist seminar, led by no less a figure than Lawrence Olivier” (49) and “the

famous Marxist bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, Collett’s, could no longer

accommodate all their publications [as] left-wing journals proliferated to such an

extent [there were] more than a hundred and fifty on display” (50) at any one time. In

Arthur Marwick’s study of The Sixties, he makes sure to state throughout that, in spite

of aiming for a “classless”, “meritocratic” society, the post-war consensus remained

strongly aware of social class. “Regularly throughout the sixties interviews and opinion

polls showed that well over 90 per cent of the population recognised the existence of

social classes” (278), whilst one “representative sample” broke these self-identified

classes down into 69% working class, 29% middle class, 1% upper class, and 1% upper-

middle class with a 1% “other” category. It can be seen that this lingering awareness of

class in the face of an ideological desire to “progress” beyond it represents the battle-

lines across which Seventies class struggles would divide.

The “experimental” novelists who already had committed political undertones

to their works, to different extents, responded to such a climate in different ways. B.S.

Johnson (whose political radicalisation alongside Alan Burns is described in my paper

“Cell of One” (2014)) would comment in an interview to Burns that “in England I don’t

think books can change anything. Here if you want change you’ve got to throw bombs

or work through parliament” (The Imagination on Trial, 88). His turn to political

filmmaking in March! (1970), Unfair! (1970), and What is the Right Thing and am I

Doing It? is accompanied by the politically volatile Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry

(1973) featuring a terrorist for a lead character. Eva Figes, whose 1973 essay

“Accustomed as I am to Public Speaking” deals directly with writers’ political

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commitments, stated that “a writer… must have the same political commitment as any

other citizen, ‘must’ because there is no room for sitters-on-the-fence. If you are not

for you are against, and inaction and apathy become guilt by default”. As will be further

described in chapter 3, it is during this period where Figes’ career as feminist essayist

extends its scope to matters of the Welfare State, free speech and the role of

humanism in life and government policy generally. The demand for a writer to hold

political commitment in their approach to the novel form is never more outspoken

than during the early 1970s, but it is also the point at which the sense of the novel

form as an important political battlefield in itself starts to become unstuck. A review of

Figes’ B (1972) sent to her in a letter by Johnson demonstrates how politics and the

novel form were beginning to jar when described in the same register;

It becomes increasingly clear to many writers that the only honest thing for a
novel to be about is writing a novel. The truly contemporary novelist’s dialogue
is not now with God, or a hypothetical reader, or even with himself: but with his
material, life itself, or those aspects in which he or she is particularly interested.
Readers might do well to give this basic honesty a chance, for Eva Figes’ new
novel B is still highly readable: no one need imagine that it is in any way
difficult.

The postmodern trope of the novel about novels, the text about texts, is praised as the

“truly contemporary” way of engaging with the form, yet – against postmodern

distance – this is depicted as the more authentic way of reaching “life itself” in a

mimetic fashion. But the demand that readers engage with “this basic honesty” and

the promise that it is “still highly readable” betrays a sense of over-compensation; a

feeling that the “experimental” novel as a means of revolutionising the novel for an age

of mass communication may have been asking too much of a conservative reading

public after all. The dichotomy between the populist and the avant garde novel, argued

against so often and so convincingly in the Sixties, appears to re-emerge with a new

urgency at the moment of crisis.

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 It is in the exhaustion that occurs after the failure of the “experimental”

novelists to pull down the monolithic Nineteenth Century Novel when familiar

“postmodern” attitudes become their most visible. Whereas the “Space Age” may have

promised an exciting, living “scientific revolution”, the disillusion brought by its limited

results frames itself with palpable irony; as Brook-Rose wrote in retrospect in 1981’s A

Rhetoric of the Unreal, “That this century is undergoing a reality crisis has become a

banality, easily and pragmatically shrugged off. Perhaps it is in fact undergoing a crisis

of the imagination; a fatigue, a decadence” (3). Figes’ essays of the time demonstrate a

similar attitude. One, “The New Humanism”, clearly intended for the New Humanist

magazine to which she often contributed, describes how

I grew up during a period which now looks, with hindsight, mighty like the tail-
end of the Industrial Miracle. It was like a star which flares up to burn with
dazzling brightness just before the moment of collapse and death. And I
suppose extreme youth lent a certain enchantment to the view…

The essay then goes on to get lost in a form of aggressive irony that, without any sense

in which direction it is aimed, lends the entire piece an unexplained bitterness. The

earlier unpublished piece “Prosaic” (1970) provides some indication of its direction,

beginning with the line, “We have outgrown ourselves. Sit, bored and alienated,

watching astronauts float about in black space on television”. What had previously

been marvels of science, technology and progress become ironic symbols of

commercialised, purposeless first world ennui. It could be that, in the face of daily

news about suffering and conflict, the cause of the New Novel appeared somewhat

ephemeral. It could also be simply that, once the novelty wore off, the “experimental”

writers were left with little financial reward for a decade’s work and, faced by

plummeting living standards, were beginning to reassess their position.

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 As Maureen Duffy described the situation to Melanie Seddon, “in the seventies

there was an economic crisis and publishers told those of us who were writing novels

(as they often do) that the novel was dead and we should write non-fiction”. Economic

imperatives can be seen throughout the surviving “experimental” writers’ career

trajectories from 1973 onwards. Alan Burns and Christine Brooke-Rose both took up

lecturing positions; Burns’ The Angry Brigade (1973), his most “realist” work after a

string of increasingly “cut-up” pieces would be his last published novel until 1981’s The

Day Daddy Died, whilst Brooke-Rose’s 1975 Thru, compiled during the early 1970s, is in

many ways a parody of literary “experiment” and marked the end of her novel writing

career until 1984’s Amalgamemnon. Eva Figes, although continuing to publish novels,

was increasingly concerned with journalism and non-fiction writing which, it can be

seen, changed the content of her novel writing away from “experimental” concerns.

1973 marks the end of Ann Quin and B.S. Johnson’s careers as it was the year of their

suicides, in August and November respectively. The unpublished works that they left

behind, Quin’s The Unmapped Country set in a mental asylum and Johnsons’ See the

Old Lady Decently about his mother, both centre upon fixations they had held

throughout their writing careers and lives in general. Considering these writers as a

group, as is the concern of this study, also allows us to consider the cumulative effect

that the end of “experimental” novel writing would have created. Whereas much of the

longevity, vitality and relative success of the group was attained through the mutual

benefits of promoting a shared cause, the fewer writers there are still engaging with

such a cause, the less easy it is to continue both morally and economically. As the “long

Sixties” marked an end of a whole series of cultural and economic developments, the

British “experimental” novel would also change considerably as the Seventies moved

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on into the “postmodern” era and newer conceptions of the novel and its function

came to the fore.

1.3.3: The “Experimental” and the “Postmodern”

When cultural theorists engage with the notion of “Postmodernity” as the dominant

mode of being during the late twentieth century – what David Harvey labels

“neoliberal” and Jameson “late capitalist” – the “postmodern” is taken as that which

culturally reflects this way of being in a succinct fashion. For Linda Hutcheon the

preference of surfaces over deep narratives of history is typified in the popularity of

“historiographic metafiction” and for Brian McHale a lack of faith in representation

moves literature away from the problems of epistemology and towards a project of

disrupting ontology. The common tropes of irony, playfulness and iconoclasm are

symptoms of an advanced society which no longer holds faith in Grand Narratives and

whether one celebrates or criticises this lies at the heart of any discussion on the

subject of the “postmodern”. What marks out many critical responses to the

“postmodern”, however, is not necessarily their wholehearted rejection of what the

concept represents but the moments of break and rupture in the process of its

formation which mark other possibilities and potential trends that may have emerged

in its place.

Raymond Williams, in a lecture posthumously published entitled “The Politics of

the Avant Garde”, focuses more on the Thirties than the Sixties, but nevertheless

makes very similar comments to those writing about “postmodernism”,

The rhetoric may still be of endless innovation. But instead of revolt there is the
planned trading of spectacle, itself significantly mobile and, at least on the
surface, deliberately disorienting. We then have to recall that the politics of the
avant garde, from the beginning, could go either way. (62)

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In this comment, as well as the rest of the essay, Williams posits a level of complicity in

the functioning of the cultural marketplace which, for him, represents a conservative

cynicism divorced from the transformative desires which lie behind radical aesthetics.

What the “experimental” writers demonstrate, however, is how a shared vision of

radical purpose in reshaping the novel form could in fact work in harmony with

material interests; pressuring the Arts Council and the BBC, amongst other institutions,

to act in the interests of “anti-Establishment” avant garde writers. It is not the presence

of material commercial interests that renders an avant garde reactionary but the lack

of a political will to commandeer and reorientate those structures. It is the perceived

apolitical, complacent nature of “postmodernism” that Eagleton targets in his polemic

The Illusions of Postmodernism, laying the blame upon

post-structuralism, which emerged in oblique ways from the political ferment of

the late 1960s and early 1970s, and which like some repentant militant became
gradually depoliticised after being deported abroad… [It] succeeded in hijacking
much of that political energy, sublimating it into the signifier in an era when
precious little subversion of any other sort seemed easily available. (25)

It is in this mode that Marxist critics especially have approached “postmodernism”.

Jameson’s view of a 1960s “truly revolutionary collective experience… systematically

effaced by the return of desperate individualisms” (Brecht and Method, 10) does

similar work in placing a distinction between the world of possible utopias before May

’68 and the world after its “failure”. It is an argument that is in many ways very

convincing and accurately describes the sorts of transformations going on within

academia and the wider literary and cultural industries in general. These

transformations too were only made in response to and within the context of a

changing economy. As work like Jodi Dean’s demonstrates, the suitability of a

“postmodern” vision of the world as just another text and the mass communication-

enabled increasing casualization and deregulation within the global economy (a

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“communicative capitalism”) makes thinking beyond the boundaries of the

postmodern surface difficult.

What the “experimental” novelists represent, however, and what their

particular perspective on the Sixties allows us in turn to see, is – as Eva Figes writes in

Tragedy and Social Evolution – “individual genius is not necessarily enough, and it is

important to be born at the right time… a tree, however healthy, will not bear fruit

unless the soil and weather are right” (7). The progressive “anti-Establishment”

ideology of the Sixties grew, as has been shown, out of a society-wide investment in

creating prosperity for all following the Second World War. Considering one of the

hallmarks of neoliberal economics has been the growth of immense wealth disparities

in the midst of seemingly wealthy nations, one cannot help but place the self-reflexive

reveries of postmodernism within a similar context; the Establishment revelling in the

old, cynical about the new, set against anything but superficial change and, when

pushed, denying that change is even possible. Class mobility and educational access

have never been meaningfully distinguishable from the macroeconomies of which they

are factors. If “postmodernism” is marked by the apolitical and culturally self-regarding,

is this not as much a comment on who constructs the culture as the content of the

culture itself? By looking at these British “experimental” writers in the context of the

Sixties we are indeed looking at one of the “possible” avant garde philosophies which

never “came to be” in a hegemonic sense, but we are also looking at the Sixties

through the writing of a group it managed to just about sustain; at the periphery and

the forefront at the same moment.

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Chapter 2: “Ground Down, and Other Clichés”: Class, Crisis and Consciousness in B.S.

Johnson

In addressing the British “experimental” novel of the Sixties, it is fitting that the first

writer studied in depth should be B.S. Johnson. A tireless innovator in terms of the

physical form of the book, Johnson was widely known as the creator of such works as

the “book in a box” The Unfortunates. Perhaps as a result of this, Johnson was often

dismissed as a writer who used “gimmicks”; superficial tricks which, condemningly, had

“already been done” (Gasiorek) by the likes of Laurence Sterne. However, it is his will to

generate a new form for the novel – innovating not only physically but in terms of style

and content as well – which makes him a central figure in the Sixties “experimental”

literary scene. Often bullish in his championing of the cause of “writing as though it

mattered”, B.S. Johnson could be seen as a kind of figurehead for underappreciated

writers of the time. As will be seen, Johnson’s work is currently returning to scholars’

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attention as writing worthy of merit. The aspect of Johnson’s work that has yet to be

fully unpacked and which is of central concern to the interests of this study is how

Johnson’s relationship with the British class system are thoroughly imbued in his

writing. By addressing the aspects of class in Johnson’s work the actuality of Sixties

changing attitudes can be placed under the spotlight and the radical political aspect of

the search for new novel forms uncovered.

2.1: Critical Understanding of B.S. Johnson

Early academic reception of Johnson focused primarily upon his work as a formal

innovator; albeit with the name-checking of his inspirations, Joyce and Beckett (along

with the aforementioned, Sterne) as a subtle caveat as to his comparatively inferior

status. His place in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, written by Morton P. Levitt, is

centred on how, “for an English writer, Johnson is remarkably conscious and theoretical

in his ideas about what he wants to do” (439). A similar essay by Robert S. Ryf

appearing in Critique in 1977 identifies Johnson with the idea that “experimentation

was not something to be simply gotten out of one’s system so that one could get back

to the mainstream but was, indeed, the mainstream” (73). The place of Johnson is

defined alongside “experimentation” and the “theoretical” approaches that enter into

his writing, with the implication that in order to read Johnson’s work one must similarly

be immersed within such “conscious” approaches. In an extreme yet illuminating

example, Valerie Butler describes one of Johnson’s BBC interview appearances in which

his arguments were edited out of the final show and “the platform on which he had

hoped to counter some of the negative press his novels received in review simply

presented listeners with the BBC’s view of literary experiment” (122) which, as can be

imagined from the description of BBC policy presented in the first chapter, were as

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negative one might expect. Sympathetic or outwardly hostile, B.S. Johnson’s name was

nevertheless understood on similar reductive terms as a modern novelist taking things

“too far”.

As Glyn White suggests in Reading the Graphic Surface, however, “the extent of

Johnson’s experimentation becomes problematic for his legacy only when surveys of

his work are forced to confront the lack of formal homogeneity between the novels”

(85). Without a consistent line of argument obviously connecting the works of the

Johnson oeuvre, academic reviewers were left only with an abstract appreciation of his

commitment to experimenting. Under such conditions the study of Johnson soon dried

up in Britain, leaving only a “fragmentary, cult appreciation” of his work in America

“with Johnson somewhat awkwardly becoming a postmodernist or, at least, a

harbinger of postmodernity” (Tew and White, 6). Outside of Philip Tew’s monograph

B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading in 2001 and a handful of journal articles, interest in B.S.

Johnson would not properly return to the British academy until Jonathan Coe’s 2004

biography, Like a Fiery Elephant; the resulting interest inspired by which can be seen in

the essays collected in Tew and White’s Re-Reading B.S. Johnson (2007), amongst other

publications. Unlike his key influences of Joyce and Beckett, Johnson’s collected work

lacks a coherent internal logic of progression – limiting its initial academic appeal – yet

once theories inspired by postmodern readings are available alongside a sudden new

wealth of biographical insight, a new set of multifaceted approaches is now appearing

in places such as BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, the first dedicated Johnson studies

periodical. As of the end of 2013, the British Library will also have catalogued their

archive holdings, making direct access to Johnson’s personal papers possible as never

before.

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 In terms of taking B.S. Johnson’s life as a direct influence upon his writing, there

are a number of clear correlations that have long been established: the most obvious

two being Trawl and See the Old Lady Decently that comment upon their own

autobiographical inspiration as part of the narrative of the text. Similarly, however,

Nicolas Tredell has drawn out in his work Fighting Fictions how Johnson’s position as

“accounts clerk” at a number of businesses during the early 1950s “bore fictional fruit

in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry” (8), and Jonathan Coe has identified the part-

time teaching position Johnson took in the early 1960s, “typical of the hand-to-mouth

existence he had to cope with for the next three years or so”, as directly entering in to

Albert Angelo. In my own work I have also drawn out influences upon these texts from

Johnson’s pro-Trade Union activism in regards to Christie Malry… (2014) as well as his

own comprehensive school experiences that shaped Albert Angelo (2011). In spite of

these and other attempts to draw from Johnson’s life as a means of gaining insight into

his texts, there has yet to be a protracted reading of how Johnson’s experience as a

working class author impacts upon his overall approach. Perhaps by readdressing

tropes emergent within theoretical and textual readings of Johnson’s work a fuller

synthesis of the “experimental” Johnson and the biographical Johnson can be

negotiated.

Concerning the “experimental” Johnson, the most commonly returned to

characteristic of his novels is their use of metafictional techniques. The interpretations

of his use of an intrusive and omnipotent author-figure are as numerous as his own

usage of the device. An example from the end of House Mother Normal, where the

House Mother uses her extra page “outside the… framework of twenty-one pages per”

character to describe the novel as “a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of [the

writer’s] skull! What a laugh!” (22) may be read in a McHalean manner as simply an
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ontological scandal illuminating fiction’s inherent artifice. However, when considered

next to authorial intervention of See the Old Lady Decently, a novel in which “Johnson

insisted at an early stage that the writing of the novel must itself be one element of the

novel” (Ryf, 68), the same framework of interpretation begins to falter. Indeed, an

interjection in which “I have just broken off to pacify my daughter” (27) that leads to a

story in which he is the parent – an inversion of the motherhood theme of the novel –

can be seen to anchor the novel more firmly in reality, in the present of its writing; the

opposite of the earlier distancing technique.

A similar set of opposing readings can be drawn from the overall effect on the

novels of Johnson’s techniques of physical manipulation of text, graphic surface, and (in

the case of The Unfortunates) bookbinding. Again, the readings seem to be determined

by pre-existing preferences for “traditional” aspects such as narrative or

“experimental” interest in technical innovation. Ryf, in his 1977 article, almost sidesteps

The Unfortunates’ unorthodox structuring (each chapter presented individually bound,

loose within a box to be read in any order by the reader) in favour of “what comes

through most forcefully,” which is “not the question of order but of grief” (64). The

implication is almost that the novel would have been better without the “question of

order” being raised at all, the better to emphasise the “grief”. 12 On the other hand,

readings such as Alan Kirby’s in Digimodernism concentrate entirely upon the

technique used; in this case, as a precursor to contemporary digital texts. “The

sequencing of the novel” is placed foremost in the reading; where it was once

“traditionally the author’s sole responsibility” it is now “carried out by the ‘reader’”

(92). For Kirby, this means that The Unfortunates has 1.551121 times 10 to the power

12
This was an approach shared by the publishers of the Hungarian translation who presented the text as
a bound paperback. The reasons for this editorial intervention were most likely financial, however, rather
than aesthetic.

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of 25 “possible orders”, in the manner of a variable computer programme. As with the

meaning of the author-figure, there are here two directly contrasting takes on

Johnson’s innovations; either they get in the way of the writing or they are the primary

function of the text.

Studies such as Glyn White’s Reading the Graphic Surface and Philip Tew’s B.S.

Johnson: A Critical Reading have made convincing arguments against the kind of

approaches that would identify a contradiction between unorthodox typography and

the mimetic function of Johnson’s fiction. White’s thesis is that “disruptions and

difficulties at the level of graphic surface which require special negotiation are part of

the process of reading the text in which they appear and… cannot be abstracted from

it” (21), as a result “the reader responds to [them as they would] to difficulties in the

purely semantic message, by taking context and metatext into account” (22). This can

perhaps best be witnessed in the Johnson canon in the case of the section beginning

“Julie rang on the Saturday…” that conveys a sense of the frailty concomitant with grief

both in a single paragraph describing the news of Tony’s death and in the physical act

of the reader holding a lone piece of paper (White, 116). It does, however, also help to

demonstrate many of the moments of existential crisis such as the “Fuck all this lying!”

(167) of Albert Angelo and the “But why? All is chaos and / unexplainable” (82) of

Christie Malry… that Tew ties in to his description of the Johnsonian aesthetic;

The form and the content through various modes of irresolution exemplify the
problematic at the core of Johnson’s aesthetic drive, the admission of, if
undialecticised, otherwise oppositional elements of life and language that
would remain divided as forms of impossibility or irresolution. (“(Re)-
Acknowledging B.S. Johnson’s Radical Realism, or Re-Publishing The
Unfortunates”)

It can be seen that the initial readings that locate a contradiction within Johnson’s

works – positioning them as oxymoronic realist-metafictions – can be incorporated

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within more nuanced readings that demonstrate the compatibility and interrelation of

elements. It is this particular “undialecticised” core of Johnson’s writing in which its

aesthetic unity and narrative strength lies.

The “undialecticised” core of Johnson’s writing is engaged with at essay-length

by Carol Watts in “’The Mind has Fuses’: Detonating B.S. Johnson” through the central

metaphor taken from The Unfortunates quoted in her title. She describes it as the

critical point the “irascible sense of impasse” that marks Johnson’s writing when “the

discovery of sometimes incontrovertible limits…might make the lights go out

altogether” due to “affective overload” (80). It is an image that recurs both in Johnson’s

published work, his letters and his notebooks: an overwhelming sense of the “chaos” of

the universe that overcomes any attempt at meaningful encounters and narratives.

This critical moment is read by a number of critics as a point of deepest existential

crisis and modernist alienation. For Levitt it is connected to Johnson’s metafictionality:

“an obvious heightening of the Romantic obsession with poetic creation but in a more

human context” (440). Robert Bond similarly identifies a “vocationalism” – specifically

in Albert Angelo’s use of architecture – that is “removed from any notion of collective

or collaborative labour” and relates to an “ideology of inwardness and individuation”

(44). The critical moment in which Johnson breaks from traditional description of a

fictional world is presented as escape from the world, as either an elevation or a

collapse, which represents a break from the material into the ideal. In a thematic

sense, Johnson is following in the long tradition of bourgeois avant garde writing and

experiencing a fragmentation of the personality, a descent into the realm of the soul.

The modernist Johnson can be seen to break free of history in both these

ecstatic moments and equally through the abandoning of traditional, or Nineteenth

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Century Novel, form. For Johnson, “the traditional novel…must be avoided because it

legitimises acceptance of the past” (39), to use Bond’s wording. In an interview with

Alan Burns, Johnson himself described the “exorcism” that he experienced by writing

himself out of the past – specifically his own past – and now “if I want to recall how I

felt at the time I wrote Trawl I can read Trawl, but I don’t have to carry it with me. I

don’t want that stuff popping into my mind” (85). The experience that Johnson conveys

is one of an individuation not only distinct from what might loosely be termed the

objective conditions of history, but from a personal sense of subjectively experienced

history. Identity is rendered sovereign over both time and space. To return to reading

Johnson from his influences, his style here is redolent of Beckett’s breathless solipsistic

monologues in Malone Dies or The Unnameable. Unlike Beckett, however, Johnson’s

collapse of being is driven home through its narrative counterpoint with the in depth

“realist” descriptions of real life events documented elsewhere in the same novel. To

the read the texts alone it would thus be fitting to consider Johnson a “working class

modernist”. The negotiation between social documentation and the individual mind

within his novels always inevitably favours the latter.

2.2: Working Classness and Labour Value

As a means of addressing this quality of Johnson’s writing in regards to his class

background without staging a re-enactment of the Brecht/Lukács debate, it will help if

we introduce some of Johnson’s own ideas concerning the role of politics in literature.

Collected in The Imagination on Trial, Johnson’s interview with Burns sees him

defending the fact that “outside writing I’m a very political animal. My novels have

generally been written from a political stance but the politics have been very much in

the background” (88). For Johnson his contemporary British readers “don’t regard

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books as a way of changing the world” (89); at least not in the way that “the generation

of… Welsh miners who educated themselves in libraries [or] the Left Book Club in the

thirties” (89) did. The novel is simply an expression of experience, not a means to

communicate political points – especially now that cinema and television were playing

such a dominant role in the national culture. His own political aspirations he

channelled in to films such as March! and Unfair! made with Alan Burns that “helped a

bit in mobilising the trade union movement” (89). For B.S. Johnson, audiences needed

addressing directly should a political point need to made – the notion that subject

matter not directly political may have a politics of its own does not seem a conscious

concern.

When we look to B.S. Johnson as a working class writer we are therefore not

looking to him as a writer for the working class as an audience. Neither are we looking

to him as a writer of the working class who would seek to translate his experience into

the bourgeois novel form. Rather, we are simply looking to him as a writer that is

working class. Although in the post-Blairite era of “identity politics” such an approach

may appear reductive, from a historical perspective it locates B.S. Johnson at a critical

moment in the expansion of the post-war welfare state. As a member of the working

class Johnson nevertheless received a state funded university education leaving him in

a position shared by many of his generation that now considered themselves “between

classes”. The removal of traditional barriers to cultural institutions does not remove

class distinctions, however, rather it indicates that class is not a static notion but a

historically shifting negotiation of economic contradictions. Similarly, to seek a static

definition of the “working classness” of Johnson’s novels is to miss their vitality as

historical-cultural documents; narratological attempts at the unification of personal

contradictions. The “blown fuse” of the Johnsonian mind, its chaos and confusion, is a
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violent collision between proletarian experience and the literary ideology of the

bourgeoisie.

Johnson’s presentation of class-consciousness does not occur on an abstract

level so much as physically, as part of the symbols documented during everyday life.

Trawl presents the genesis of this class consciousness as part of the young Johnson’s

wartime evacuee experience wherein the “dislike of us, the bare toleration of us” (51)

by their Daily Telegraph reading hosts is initially considered to be the sneer of the boss

to the worker; “my mother was in fact or virtually a servant”. Taking a moment to

remember, however, Johnson then clarifies that she was “not a servant paid by him,

not a servant to him unpaid, but just of the servant class, to him” (51). When Nicos

Poulantzas writes about class-consciousness he describes the “autonomous discourse”

of the working class “which Lenin called ‘class instinct’, which bursts through the

envelope that is the domination of bourgeois ideology” (122). Cornelius Castoriadis

locates this instinct in the fact that “everything that is presented to us in the social-

historical world is inextricably tied to the symbolic” (117) and, as such, creates a “social

imaginary” of shared class perspective. In each of Johnson’s encounters with class-

consciousness we find elements of this cultural framework being brought in as

signifiers but, more importantly, we also find class conflict, prejudices, and the

concomitant feelings of shame and resentment “all too aware now of the worst of the

human situation” (Trawl, 54). These realisations are presented in an almost opposing

manner to the “blown fuse” epiphanies; the sites of Johnson’s resentful experiences

reconstructed in documentary terms. There is a compact with the reader which

assumes awareness of social signifiers such as The Daily Telegraph and a willingness to

allow the situation presented to convey the message. The opposition between

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Johnson’s modernist, epiphanic style and the novels’ moments of social realism create

a certain narrative tension which pulls between class poles.

In terms of the Marxist calibration of class-consciousness as a means of taking a

“class in itself” and organising it into a “class for itself” there remains very little in

Johnson’s works; even if we do consider him in the light of his later Trade Union activist

interests. In terms of class in relation to the mode of production, E.P. Thompson gives

perhaps its most practical explanation in the introduction to The Making of the English

Working Class (here abridged as “The Making of Class” in Joyce’s anthology);

Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited

or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between
themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and
usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the
productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily. (131)

From this perspective, the professional writer can never be considered as a member of

a particular class at its “purest” consciousness in conflict with another class; the act of

voluntary, self-expressive labour isn’t really alienated, even if it is exploited. The result

is the kind of irony by which Johnson positions Christie Malry in his job as a bank

employee – “he had not been born into money…he would therefore have to acquire it

as best he could… The course most likely to benefit him would be to place himself next

to the money… Christie was a simple person” (11). The individual that has identified

their pre-determined class within capitalist society yet has not located their own place

within it ends up replicating the superficial trappings of the ruling bourgeoisie – being

near money – without receiving access to the economic position that would justify that

ideology. From the perspective of labour relations the professional writer struggles to

be identifiable as “working class” at all.

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 What Johnson does present us with, however, is an organic replication of this

“class instinct” in the way in which he engaged with fellow writers. Famously

championing his contemporaries “who are writing as though it mattered” (Aren’t You

Rather…, 29), Johnson often positioned himself as a leader in the struggle for better

literature. Active in the Arts Council, Society of Authors and – briefly – the campaign for

Public Lending Right (as described in the first chapter), Alan Burns explained this

militancy to Jonathan Coe in terms of how Johnson “didn’t fight for the writing of

people he knew because they were his friends, but maybe they were his friends

because he loved the work… partly it was generalship; you see, this was part of his

campaign for the good stuff and we were his allies” (398/399). In terms of solidarity,

Johnson finds his comradeship in fellow experimental writers who are both equally

passionate about their work and equally poorly paid for it. His championing of fellow

writers certainly didn’t extend to those he saw as the “Establishment”, as Ghose

describes in his short piece “Bryan”, Johnson would often verbally abuse writers he

considered to

belong to a particular class, socially much higher than [his own]; they are of
that group of gifted or fortunate people whose class, together with an Oxbridge
education, assures them a privileged position in London’s literary power
struggle. Bryan despised them. (26)

Reading through Johnson’s letters and notebooks, the particular class dynamics by

which this “campaign” can be seen as framed are notably similar to the formation of

class-consciousness that is described in his novels; a pattern of rejection with an

occasional success that is formulated as a victory. In a letter from Zulfikar Ghose as

early as 1954, it is clear that Johnson is intimidated by the elite magazine The Listener,

leading Ghose to suggest that “editors are reasonably favourable to good small poems

by unknown poets like us” and long poems are rejected “more because they are long”.

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The influence of Ghose early in Johnson’s career as a fellow self-mythologiser also plays

into this sense of an embattled group of writers against the Establishment (in a letter

marked 9th April 1959, Ghose literally states that he wants to “discuss an idea… for

starting a new movement in poetry”). Ghose, amongst others who formed around

Johnson’s Universities Poetry circle during his undergraduate years, validated Johnson’s

writing and located it within their particular “movement”; one at variance with the

“horrid bores of the Movement then in vogue” (“Bryan”, 23). That this conception of

poetry draws upon the high modernist manifestos of such avant garde groupings as the

futurists and the imagists is demonstrative in terms of its ability to be at once rooted in

privileged positions and make claims to be anti-bourgeois as a “higher” culture. That,

by 1960, Johnson is writing in his fifth notebook the rather peevish note, “Zulfikar

Ghose, O.M. – in 30 years’ time a smiling, bald member of the establishment” (73),

perhaps demonstrates how his particular conception of a “movement” develops a

more fully oppositional class dynamic. Taking the language of group-formation from

modernist elites, Johnson goes on to apply it in a manner more befitting one with

opposing class interests. Johnson’s hardening of insurrectionary attitudes in his

relationship with the “Establishment” can be seen developing right through his attack

on the Society of Authors, into his sputtering attacks during the Public Lending Right

campaign, and eventually, albeit in a humorous manner, in his novel Christie Malry’s

Own Double-Entry.

The inversion of a model of personal interest to serve the shared interests of a

class does not only occur in Johnson’s appropriation of the “movement” model of

intellectual favouritism, but also in his continued efforts towards receiving his pay in

salary form, rather than per novel. In a practical sense wage pay would relieve the

financial and emotional burdens that living between lump-sum paycheques creates.
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But, like all negotiations over pay, there exists the clash of interests over symbolic value

also. Rod Mengham, discussing Johnson’s demands in relation to his sense of self,

suggests that wages would “reflect as far as possible not the market value of the text,

but the value of the writer’s artistic gifts, of his creative personality” (100). Mengham

notes how Johnson frequently deals with his own identity through the metaphors of

“debts, loans, mortgages, value” (100). When a wage is paid to the writer, Johnson’s

novels are figuratively recognised as emanations of an individual and not simply as

commodities. A similar formulation of feeling is noted in the modernist avant garde by

Raymond Williams in The Politics of Modernism, which he sees as “distantly analogous

to the working class development of collective bargaining… yet one of the central

points of their complaint against this treatment of art was that creative arts was more

than simple labour” (54). For Williams this implies an aristocratic approach to culture

that seeks to remove it from the bourgeois world of trade, where for Mengham

Johnson can be seen to internalise trade to the extent that he perceives himself as a

commodity.

To get to the root of this seeming contradiction it is perhaps worthwhile to turn

to Marx’s Capital wherein the very same contradiction is posited at the heart of

capitalism itself. In Chapter 6, opening a discussion of wage labour, Marx describes how

the proletarian “must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his

own commodity, and this he can only do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer

temporarily, for a definite period of time. By this means alone can he avoid renouncing

his rights over it” (109). For a biographically-influenced writer such as Johnson “labour-

power” is entirely enmeshed within the self and inseparable from it. In asking for a

wage, Johnson is then implying that the commodity of the manuscript is not what he is

selling – he is only providing labour-power for the benefit of a publisher, who in turn
98
claims surplus value in the sale of the commodity: the published novel. Johnson is

asking for a formal recognition of his proletarian status in relation to the publisher-as-

bourgeoisie. However, the market value of a novel is not dictated by the labour-power

invested within it, nor is a writer beholden to the publisher for access to the means of

production in creating the initial commodity form of the manuscript. Johnson’s

imaginative translation of traditional working class labour relations into the literary

industry represents the “blown fuse” of clashing, oppositional ideologies in the field of

economics. Johnson is thrown into a world of “chaos” not in an existential sense, but as

an alienated worker within an individualistic free market.

From the perspective of the bourgeoisie, for whom individualism is a beneficial

ideological model economically, Johnson’s demand for payment in the form of wage

labour can be taken simply as an upwardly mobile product of the meritocracy not yet

acclimatised to their independent position. From a working class perspective, however,

the wage system plays a pivotal cultural role (as indicated in the Marx quotation) in the

separation of work and home life and, in a related manner, the upholding of self-

respect. In his study of “aspects of working class life” The Uses of Literacy, Richard

Hoggart describes the importance of a “sense of independence which arises from a

respect for oneself [that] no one can physically take away”; something that relies upon

“keeping the raft afloat” (79), the continuance of which is guaranteed in a consistent

wage. What we are encountering in B.S. Johnson can therefore be considered a

reaction against the destabilisation of working conditions he experienced in his

transition to professional writer. The very form of Johnson’s labour was considered

suspect, unreliable, and he for practising it as a means of earning a living. This self-

conscious tension is made visible in The Unfortunates as he describes his working

conditions at his friend Tony’s house,

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 Long afternoons there, where we would fall asleep, I would, anyway, feel guilty
that we were not working as the world was working. June I remember saying
something like that, finding it difficult to accept that Tony was working when
lazing comfortably in an armchair reading a book. We were working really, it is
difficult for others to understand. (“Then he was…”, 2)

Without any noticeable difference between the activities of work and leisure the writer

appears to lack meaningful employment altogether. For a writer like Johnson who is

struggling to sustain himself financially anyway, the lack of a clear-cut and stable time

and place of work strikes at the heart of his self-respect as a worker and provider. The

demand for wage pay is not then a reflection of the actual working conditions of the

writer, but an attempt to replicate the superficial conditions of working class existence

as a salve for the ideological upset caused by the new insecurity. Wage labour is

entirely to do with Johnson’s sense of self, but not because he considered himself

implicitly valuable. Rather, without the confidence imparted to the bourgeoisie through

“cultural capital”, a secure sense of self is entirely reliant upon the “debts, loans,

mortgages” that Mengham identifies as metonymical within Johnson’s discourse.

Johnson’s particular notions of self-respect, stability and finance extend not

only into his personal impression of himself but, perhaps inevitably, also into his

attitudes to women. The commodification of sexual relationships exists not only on the

most blatant level as humour – for example, the “small kindnesses from Joan” (47)

priced at 0.28 in Christie Malry… - but also when Johnson attempts to withdraw from

the bawdy into euphemism, such as the “usual desperate business” (85) of his father

and mother’s courtship in See the Old Lady Decently. For Bourdieu, the fact that

Johnson deals in his sexual life in the same manner that he deals in his financial life is

only to be expected as part of “an appetite for possession inseparable from permanent

anxiety about property, especially about women” (330) is central to the mind-set of all

“rising classes”. Indeed, for Bourdieu “a class is defined in an essential respect by the

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place and value it gives to the sexes” (102). There is, however, another important

historical element to Johnson’s attitudes which, although conforming to Bourdieu’s

analyses, does help to move our conception of Johnson’s attitudes out of the area of

ahistorical petit bourgeois misogyny and set them in a context; that being the sexual

liberation movements of the 1960s and the women’s liberation movements of the

1970s. Where the world of Hoggart’s 1950s working class “still accepted marriage as

normal and ‘right’, and that in their early twenties [for, among other reasons,] what a

husband was earning at twenty-one he was likely to be earning at fifty-one” (58), the

1960s saw considerable changes in social conventions concerning marriage and the

family. Framed by the widespread availability of the Pill in the early 1960s and

liberalization of divorce laws in 1969 and 1973, the “permissive society” may have

reshaped certain gender relations yet, as Anne Oakley argued in 1974 (Housewife), the

impact of such changes is fairly limited beyond the middle classes. Alan Burns,

describing his time as “a member, if not leader” of a group seeking to “abolish the

family and all the stuff that goes with it” recounted to Jonathan Coe how Johnson

would argue against this: “you can’t oppose the family, it’s all we’ve got” (405).

Johnson’s attitudes are not only token for a “rising” member of the working class, but

they are also conservative in terms of contemporary mores within his social circle. On

top of conflicted class anxieties about the stability of his labour position, Johnson is

also in the uncomfortable position of appearing historically backward too. Stuck

between a discredited tradition and a rootless future Johnson adopts possessiveness as

a means to self-respect.

Johnson’s desire to find security and stability in women is evidenced in his

poetry where, as well as money-related metaphors, he also makes use of a range of

imagery borrowed from heavy industry. Collected in Penguin Modern Poets 25, his
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works “Knowing” and “And Should She Die?” both invest in the love object the qualities

of raw materials to be shaped and transformed through labour. “Knowing” describes

how “knowledge of her was / earned like miner’s pay” (138), functioning on one level

as a kind of entendre for sexual activity in the form of mining but – more importantly,

considering Johnson’s own issues regarding pay – it also suggests an approach to

relationships wherein commitment and struggle demand appropriate compensation.

Similarly, “And Should She Die?” describes a woman as loved “as Brunel loved iron”

(133), adding an intellectual element to the idea of mastering the natural and bending

it to the will of the designer. The monetary language by which Johnson engages with

women (here sexual, but elsewhere matriarchal too) is not commercial in the sense of

acquiring women as objects but a more subtle rendering of emotions-as-investment.

Such a conception of relationships is fairly close to the dead metaphors of modern

relationship counselling; “working” at “building” a relationship from “solid

foundations”. The particular twist added by Johnson’s distancing effects draws

attention to this submerged set of attitudes with a characteristic bluntness that could

easily be mistaken for casual misogyny.

In considering the double-bind of objectification as both reductive and

elevative, Julia Kristeva questions whether “the devalorisation of sex, dissociated,

parcelised, marginalised, and in the final analysis degraded… be the condition for a

phallic idealisation of Woman?” (163). Within the semantic registers of Johnson’s

works there certainly lies evidence for this to be the case. In Albert Angelo we find a

lengthy rumination upon the “heavily-beringed women of about thirty-five to be seen

in many Angel pubs,” their wedding rings “a sign of pride, of aggressive non-

availability” who “must see sex as in many ways condemning them to drudgery

through children, and dread it because of this” (135). The lesson Albert takes from this
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is his need for “someone who realised instinctively about the necessity of the illusion

of love” (135). The physical manifestation of outward signs of monogamy is enough to

conjure imagery of unavailability, both to him and then sexually in general, which in

turn leads Albert to desire an ideal woman who revels in the “illusion of love” rather

than what could be considered its material reality. The key to this desire is again

Johnson’s unstable self-image. What is desired is an investment which with regular

contributions will pay out regularly – like a wage – and provide the security necessary

for Hoggart’s all-important “self-respect”. The ultimate figure of this – following

Kristeva’s analysis – lies in Johnson’s idealised mother-figure in See the Old Lady

Decently. The two poems that make up most of the final two sections demonstrate this

process of transaction with the mother-figure clearly:

Here

she said

I love you (138)

In this short poem we see the mother-figure offering her love. This can be read both as

an act of physically giving love as an object – as in, “’here’, she said, ‘I love you’” – or as

a recollection from a certain place (“here”) wherein she once said that she loved him.

The unity of these two meanings can be understood in the final lines of the novel

constructed as poetry:

From

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 embryo

to embryan

from Em,

Me (139)

Here it is made clear that the mother-figure, as a giver of life, is simultaneously a

historical point and a giver of love. The notion of security directing Johnson’s desire

finds an ideal “lost Eden” origin point in his existence as “embryan”; mother Em and

son Bryan within a single body that will go on to be severed into two opposing mirror-

halves “EM” and “ME”. Within this construction it is evident that the “I love you” that is

given is in fact only a substitute for the “Here” that was originally an inseparable

wholeness of lover and loved. Desire is a feeling directly comparable with loss and in

giving love woman is very literally giving herself in an attempt to salve the initial wound

of separation. The entire symbolic construction of love, desire, and the ideal Woman, is

therefore yet another factor in Johnson’s sense of rootlessness and “chaos” in a

meaningless universe. Woman becomes another secure space that the self’s survival

depends on and has to be laboured for.

2.3: “Meritocracy” and Class Anxiety

At the heart of all of this turmoil over groupings, wages, women and, beneath it all,

anxiety about social stability, can be seen the rising ideology of a new social system.

Born largely from discourse about democratising elitist monolithic culture – allowing

those that excel to rise – and later emphasising the rewards of individual “aspiration”,

the drive towards expanding access created in post-war welfare state Britain eroded

class consciousness (if not actually class difference) in favour of a new “meritocracy”.

Perhaps aptly (or ironically) for such a postmodern ideological model, the original

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conceptualisation of “meritocracy” was a satire. Michael Young’s 1958 The Rise of the

Meritocracy, 1870-2033, described a future in which “intelligence and effort together

make up merit (I + E = M)” (94). Perhaps in reaction to cross-party support for

meritocratic principles, Young’s satire appears to target the worries of all parts of the

political spectrum: the meritocratic future sees the young usurping the old, individuals

replacing families, both collective bargaining and inherited wealth are banned, all in

the name of a society entirely structured around merit. Pre-Thatcher, many of the anti-

social ideas inherent within ideas of “merit” as a signifier of worth remained

scandalous and it is important to remember that the social changes that oriented

society in that direction were conducted under a different set of ideological and

economic imperatives.

Indeed, looking back on the post-war “movement of social engineering” as a

failure to accomplish radical socialist change, Zygmunt Bauman emphasises that “the

solution of problems so defined was never the goal pursued by the real forces that

gave the reform its urgency and impetus”; for organised labour it was “the right to fight

for the rising income of its members, not equality” (168) that drove change, whilst for

the centre and right it was the continuation of Keynesian economic policy. The idea of

creating “upward mobility” is positioned in direct opposition to the sort of working

class community-based attitudes described in Hoggart as they can be seen to disrupt

the basic stabilities supporting life without capital: job security, a secure marriage, and

safety-in-numbers solidarity overall.

For Johnson the values of “the rising class” are held in the same contempt

usually reserved for the Establishment proper. His most radical political work, Christie

Malry… sees undertones of this contempt running through the way in which the

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Implied Author relates presents his characters. For “The Shrike’s Old Mum”, we are told

that “it was all worth it, all those years of sacrifice, just to get my daughter placed in a

respectable novel like this, you know. It’s my crowning achievement” (156). The

respectability only lasts until the end of the page wherein her daughter and Christie

have to leave as “Sunday’s the only day we have for a really long fuck” (157). The

disposable nature of the Shrike and her Old Mum is all part of their direct relation to

Christie’s own aspirations in the form of his double-entry account with society. The

greatest reward for aspiration is reserved for Christie himself, however, as his quest

ends when he “really [does] have everything… including cancer” (177). The very

premise of Christie as a “cell of one” against society at large mimics much of the

aspirational attitude. The opening page even introduces him in Hobbesian economic

terms as one who must acquire money either through illegal methods which involve

“unpleasant (and to him unacceptable) penalties” or else through “other methods not

(somewhat arbitrarily)considered criminal by society” (11). Christie’s universe is not

one bound by any recognisable morality other than the individual’s personal account

with “THEM”; to quote Margaret Thatcher, “there is no such thing as society” – the

individual must be in constant struggle against all others.

As with the anxieties described earlier, Johnson’s particular disdain, his strength

of emotion, can be seen to originate in his own particular contradictory self-image;

unable to be truly conscious of himself he “blows a fuse” and turns to the alienation

device of ridicule. Johnson’s own notebooks are littered with soul searching about his

own class position with notes such as this one from Notebook 4:

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 I am working-class but brought up not to mix with other w/c children –
[therefore] I am not accepted either by my own class, or by others. I was always
being told I was lucky as I had things my parents never had – this missing the
point – no value to me (27).

The “lucky” one that moves out of the working class is doomed to wander between

classes, accepted by no-one. It is the kind of thought that would often strike Johnson in

tandem with observations about working class life; in this case some old men in a

Putney pub, of whom he wonders whether they have “known each other since

boyhood – or do they only seem to behave the same as ever!” (27). The sense of

identity Johnson cultivates is that of the perpetual outsider: working class to the

middle class, but within the working class he’s alone.

The “meritocratic” element of Johnson’s response to class alienation resides not

in a notion of his accessing a “higher” class position but a more conservative notion of

elite culture that, like the anti-bourgeois modernists described earlier, uses an

alternative set of class-values to more “authentically” appreciate cultural works.

Johnson’s earliest notebooks contain a number of notes regarding the plays he

attended and poetry books he was to read – most of them of the high modernist

variety of Eliot, Yeats and Pound. By Notebook 4, however, the class-consciousness

separating his appreciation from that of the academy is becoming present. Of

university he states that he “went to college – gained more specific knowledge of my

heroes (ie. admired writers) and found they were not the men I thought they were”

(30). In terms of the writers he still admired, it was the audience that he found

disillusioning: “(Arts theatre – first week – hardly anyone there) A Pinter’s [sic] play

‘The Caretaker’ as curtain went up someone said ‘another kitchen sink!’” (148).

Johnson finds himself excluded from the culture that would grant him “more specific

knowledge” of “admired writers”, but then this culture is found to be one of bourgeois

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philistinism that would relegate anything from outside its small world of privilege to

the status of “kitchen sink”. For Johnson, this was a result of his own unique experience

which was potentially superior, but in all cases fundamentally different to that of his

supposed fellows:

What I must realise about my university education is that it was … a unique

experience which must NOT be generalised about, at all costs. And no
correlatives can be found for the people with whom I was contemporary at
Kings (Notebook 5, 63).

What is appearing here is the central contradiction of post-social democratic

“meritocratic” society. The expanded state and increased access to social provision

removes individuals from traditionally static backgrounds and their cultural differences

have to be resolved on an individual basis, in turn resulting in a particular distrust of

the system that allowed them to supersede it. We see Johnson’s class position splitting

into the two apparently contradictory aspects of existential self-reflection and

socialistically-minded indignation that run throughout all of his works.

Just as publically provided education can be seen to inspire these feelings

within Johnson in himself, so does he then project his feelings back upon the

educational system that, for a brief period in the early sixties, he himself was employed

in as a substitute teacher – subsequently novelised in the form of Albert Angelo. For

the individualist Johnson, the very notion of education is the result of an artificial

“need for man to impose a pattern on life” (133) and the systems by which it is

conducted are “so desperately old-fashioned, of such very low productivity [with] the

waste, and the ineffectual cosiness of… colleagues” (52) seemingly beyond repair. The

maddening sensation of upholding a fatally flawed educational system clearly impacted

Johnson, returning as the topic of his 1967 film You’re Human Like the Rest of Them,

again featuring a teacher awash with existential despair. In Albert Angelo, however, this

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personal despair is countered by a political anger as, in solidarity with the children who

“are being cheated, and they’re being treated as subhuman beings,” the speaker in

unequivocal that “the school is a microcosm of society as a whole” (133) and “if the

government wanted better education it could be provided easily enough, so I must

conclude, again, that they specifically want the majority of children to be only partially

educated” (176). In objective terms, Johnson’s intuition was right; “although numbers

rose,” the percentage of working class children reaching university “did not rise

significantly above the pre-existing figure of about 25%” in the post-war years, whilst

“about one-third of the university intake” came from “various public, independent and

direct grant schools” which catered to the richest 7% (Bartlett, 284). Essentially the

“rising class” of university educated proletarians was expanding at the same rate that

the university places for the privileged were expanding. There may be more room at

the top, but the essential constitution of the top remained unchanged. The education

system is therefore both of the things that individualist and collectivist Johnson levelled

at it simultaneously; both inducing conformity and elitist – the two reinforcing each

other. As a member of the working class, the system is set up against Johnson and his

kind, but in realising its arbitrary nature he can conform sufficiently to its principles

that he might beat the system. Interestingly, “beating the system” lies both at the heart

of meritocratic capitalism and Gramscian organic intellectualism.

In Gramscian terms, however, the “system” as it exists in the current mode of

production can be overtaken by a new class, yet for this class to survive and create its

own ideological apologies it organically generates intellectuals that take the class’

premises as their own under the cover of objectivism. Existing intellectual groupings

are seen as experiencing an “uninterrupted historical continuity” through their

hegemonic class agreement that allows them to “put themselves forward as

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autonomous and independent of the dominant social group” (303). However, at the

core of these premises lie “’specialisations’ of partial aspects of the primitive activity of

the new social type which the new class has brought into prominence” (302) –

liberalism, emerging from free market capitalism, takes private property as one of its

first principles, for example. To extrapolate from Gramsci’s theory the notion of class

conditions informing organic intellectuals and apply it on a micro scale, the sense in

which Johnson reinterprets through his particular class perspective can be identified

with a positive rather than a negative intellectualism. In Johnson’s words, from the first

section of The Unfortunates, “I selected and elected to hear what I needed, what was

of most use to me” (4). The grounds of Johnson’s interpretive framework, having

formed around a proletarian mode of being, differ from those of the Establishment

from their very foundations, and so even if he adopts many ideas from the bourgeois

ideological superstructure which surrounds him, Johnson does so on different, if not

opposing, bases.

In Trawl, Johnson returns to memories of his childhood schooling as a means of

understanding the class aspect to his distrust of power. He begins with an instance of

being caught stealing fruit before briefly moving on a tangent in which he was accused

of being a “THIEF and LIAR and CHEAT” (67) for stealing a Bible from another pupil’s

desk after someone else had stolen his. The lesson of the tangent was that although

the young Johnson was in the right, “she [the teacher] had the power, ah, the power!”

(67). From this lesson, the narrative then moves to the next assembly in which the

headmaster complained of a pupil stealing fruit to eat – “it took some time before I

realised he was talking about me. It was humiliating to realise it” (73). For Johnson,

being used as an illustrative example of bad behaviour before the entire school,

masked behind anonymity in order to appear as an objective correlative to badness in

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general, was a clear example of hypocritical “bourgeois offense. The class war again.

They made me their enemy” (73). What the power structure of the school evoked for

Johnson was the injustice of power and in order to defend himself against this he

needed to reassure himself of the conditions by which he understood himself to be

correct. Johnson describes the feeling as “anxiety about shame” (73); a sense that one

does not know the codes by which those with power attribute shame, yet being fairly

sure that marked differences between yourself and them – hunger, scruffiness – would

be a likely signifier of shamefulness.

That Johnson goes on to enter the world of educators and the educated in spite

of his “anxiety about shame” does not assume that education has done its job of

socialising him, nor does it imply that Johnson himself successfully met the demands

made of him, rather it indicates a means by which the internalised anxiety results in an

outer toughness, authenticity and sincerity approximating the “self-respect”

demanded of working class sensibility. For Bourdieu this anxiety is related to the

autodidacticism by which the working class approach the bourgeois body of knowledge

and, as a result, end up “ignorant of the right to be ignorant” that “educational

entitlement” (329) confers. For Hoggart the psychological and intellectual effects of

class “ignorance” are reinforced, or perhaps based in, a “physical appearance which

speaks too clearly of his birth; he feels uncertain and angry inside when he realises that

that, and a hundred habits of speech and manners, can ‘give him away’ daily” (301). As

a member of the working class, the idea of altering behaviour to replicate the manners

of the bourgeoisie is similarly repellent as nothing “inspires a feeling as strong as that

aroused by the person who is putting on ‘posh’ airs” (86). The result is a desperate

class anxiety in which, despite entering a typically bourgeois world (in Johnson’s case

the world of education and literature), one can never become a member. One cannot
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help “betraying” one’s origins before the middle class, and yet cannot face “betraying”

one’s origins by attempting to alter this. As a result, the “rising class” must fall back

upon working class notions of self-respect within middle class contexts.

2.4: Authenticity and Truth

Johnson’s fourth notebook – mostly written during the period of his first entrance into

the world of literature following Travelling People – demonstrates Johnson returning to

questions of his class heritage with an obstinate sense of its own ambivalence. Quoting

a television show called “Never Had it so Good” aired “(T.W. 10/3/60)”, he picks out the

line “working class with money doesn’t make you anything but working class” (115).

That this line strikes Johnson with enough force for him to write it down indicates the

way in which he would take possession of his class: in the face of the Establishment’s

use of “working class” as an insult, Johnson reclaims a deeper truth about authenticity

in the act of transcribing the proof of their class hatred. He writes to himself how

“there is no percentage in being an intellectual” (133), and fills his notebook with ideas

for working class-themed works that revel in a sense of bawdiness commonly used as a

disparaging stereotype by middle class caricaturists: “w/c poem – identification – the

quick bonk on Saturday night After bath” (30), “Play about w/c life (uncut?) with lurking

ballad singer?” (138). It is interesting that this willingness to engage with ideas of

“working classness” emerges between Travelling People and Albert Angelo – the first

being later declared a failure while the other is deeply concerned with verisimilitude. It

could perhaps be suggested that Johnson’s acceptance of himself as both working class

and a novelist at the cutting edge of literary innovation marks the starts of the

“authorised canon”, with Travelling People representing a petit bourgeois work that

“betrays itself”.

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 A major way in which Johnson felt he “betrayed himself” within refined cultural

surroundings was through his weight. Giles Gordon described him to Jonathan Coe as

housing “huge insecurity within this vast, elephantine frame. This great figure who was

sweating the whole time – it was like a sort of waterfall… I think he found his body

quite difficult to live with” (391).13 In fact, Johnson’s “fatness” becomes a recurrent

symbol within his works; sometimes referred to with a self-deprecating humour, such

as the title of his film Fat Man on a Beach, and sometimes used quite cuttingly, as in

some of the excerpts from his pupils presented in Albert Angelo: “Slobbery Jew you fat

fomf you soppy rabbi. you are a dog” (162), or the origin of the Coe biography’s title,

“he walks like a fiery elephant” (160). In the section of The Unfortunates which begins

“Yates’s is friendly…”, Johnson decides to sit upstairs in the pub and hopes no one will

notice his unusual action. Upon approaching the stairs he is met by a mirrored

reflection of himself – “St Bernard face…overweight, no, fat” – which becomes a direct

embodiment of his social anxiety as he moves “through these contented people, not a

single one noticing my fatness, or me” (3): the self is appended as an afterthought.

Taking Johnson’s fatness as a physical metaphor for his inability to conform to

middle class refinements of taste, it can almost be considered that Johnson’s obsession

with eighteenth century scatological humour – Swift, Sterne, and (although not

mentioned, a perfect intertext) Smollett – is a form of anti-bourgeois protest. Just as he

appropriated the modernist avant garde’s aristocratic protest for proletarian means,

the aristocratic values of opulence, over-abundance and joiussance flow through

Johnson’s pastiches. In “Broad Thoughts from a Home”, collected in Aren’t You Rather

Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, parodic poetry such as “crap is crap is crap is crap”

13
Interestingly, both Giles Gordon and Alan Burns move in their interviews from Johnson’s physicality to
his wife’s beauty – seemingly justifying Johnson’s attitudes towards “investment” in women by implying
that her attractiveness cancelled out his repellentness.

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is produced by the overfed, piles-ridden Samuel in a celebration of haughtiness,

extravagance and the “filthy minded readers” (94) that take pleasure in it. In his

seventh notebook Johnson similarly writes down an idea for a story in which a “Fat

man who numbers his layers of fat by great meals he has had in the past… tells them to

Dr. on death bed” (65). By returning to an aristocratic rendering of obesity as

associated with positive traits such as opulence and conspicuous consumption,

Johnson is challenging the reading presented under capitalism’s ideology of the

“protestant work ethic” which associates being overweight with laziness and gluttony.

In these flights of humour Johnson is owning his body and celebrating his physical

presence in a hyperbolic manner that rings out defiant against what is expected of him.

Alan Burns, in his short piece “You’re Human Like the Rest of Us” in which he

recalls his friendship with Johnson, uses this “larger than life” aspect of Johnson as

synonymous with his physicality, his work and his personality. Quoting Bryan Cole, he

describes how Johnson “cossetted his grossness with a gourmet’s self-indulgence… He

was not particularly tall, but he bulled large. He was broad, huge arms and thighs.

Orson Welles had the same bulk, similar features, and the same intensity too” (159).

The “intensity” of Johnson is portrayed as heroic, superhuman. The drinks bill when

working on his film Fat Man on a Beach is described as “gigantic, expenses generally

were monumental. At one stage we had to conceal them under ‘Hire of Boat’” (162). In

his short remembrance, “Bryan”, Zulfikar Ghose too writes of Johnson’s unbelievable

squash playing abilities: “it was remarkable to see that body, always so heavy and

seemingly without a potential for energetic motion when he was seated, deploy itself

with such speed on the court. More often than not, he won” (24). That both of these

close colleagues (and many of those interviewed by Coe) feel compelled to invest

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Johnson’s weight with a semi-mystical potency perhaps indicates the extent to which

Johnson’s own Rabelaisian awareness of the bodily could become contagious.

The kind of carnivalesque celebration which Johnson revels in is not one that

will shift attitudes, nor is it one which aims to – it is more along the lines of a refusal to

accept the ideological imperatives that society would impose upon him. What is being

seen in these lesser known works is reflecting one particular eccentrism of Johnson’s

overall iconoclastic approach to literature. The self-consciousness and compensating

audaciousness of Johnson’s attitude to his weight reflects the same drives he displays

when discussing the great Johnsonian bugbear of “truth”. Similar to “experimental”,

“truth” was a term that Johnson himself could never ruminate upon in a manner

acceptably academic – appearing more as an emotional plea for authenticity in the

face of academic sophism. His most expansive reading of it appears in the essay giving

its name to the collection Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs?, the

ubiquity of which in readings of Johnson has seen it, in White’s words, “almost become

B.S. Johnson, in his absence” (85). Not only is the writer compelled to tell the truth if

they are to practice in good faith, but “I would go further and say that to the extent a

reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a

failure” (“Aren’t You Rather…”, 28). For Johnson, questions of “truth” in literature then

group together a number of debates around verisimilitude, form, language, content,

mimesis, and the role of the author and place them all within a seemingly intuitive

black-and-white binary of authenticity. That Johnson’s application of his truth-mantra

overlaps so many questions commonly distinct within academic discourse could very

well be why Johnson had such little success developing it beyond a kind of rebel truism

– or a “truth of my truth”.

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 As we did with Johnson’s variable use of metafictional technique, it will benefit

our reading of Johnson’s return to the idea of “truth” to witness the different attitudes

taken to it between novels. Its most striking appearance within Johnson’s fiction is in

Albert Angelo where it serves as a narratological conclusion in the form of a

metafictional “disintegration” of story. The tone is exasperated, running in one long

sentence without punctuation; “fuck all this lying look what im [sic] really trying to

write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture…. Im trying to say something

not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about

my experience about my truth” (167). This is the Johnson who is a nightmare for one

hoping for an explanation; rambling, evasive, outspoken and exasperated with what he

sees yet incapable of properly explaining his exact meaning. Yet this is not the only

tone in which Johnson addresses the question of “truth” in his novels. In Christie

Malry… the question of the reader’s imagination – one that seems to exasperate the

Johnson of “Aren’t you rather…” – is conscripted into comedic service as the author

figure accuses the reader of “investing [his characters] with characteristics quite

unknown to me, or even at variance which such description I have given!” (51), before

granting a set of allowed freedoms to the reader imagining Christie: “You are allowed

complete freedom in the matter of warts and moles particularly; as long as he has at

least one of either” (51). Here we have ideas of “truth” and reader response used with

a Sterne-like sense of irony – revelling in the “chaos” (to use another Johnson term)

that is attributed both to literature and a life “without meaning”. This cosmic irony is

both tragic as well as comic, however, as is made clear in the “Last” section of The

Unfortunates when Johnson considers “but for his illness, death, it seems probably to

me that [he and Tony] might have grown further and further apart, he becoming more

academic, I less and less believing academic criticism had any value at all, perhaps

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saying to him in anger Let the dead live with the dead!” (4). Tony’s death, ruminated

upon throughout The Unfortunates as sitting between meaninglessness and personal

meaning – the “truth of my truth” – is validated within the novel only by Johnson’s

authorial command over it. The questions and debates around “truth” that separated

Johnson from his academic friend are resolved by death, just as in Christie Malry… they

are laughed away as a joke and in Albert Angelo collapse into narrative “disintegration”.

Evoked in mourning, laughed at and evaded, “truth” seems to become directly

associated with the Real in a Lacanian sense; imperative to a subject’s sense of the

world’s cohesion but harrowing, if not impossible to view directly. If we were to

attempt to place Johnson’s thinking within the traditions of continental philosophy,

Lacan would present a tempting answer to Johnson’s particular irresolvable ontology.

However, it is not enough simply to consider Johnson’s “truth” as a naïve

synonym for Lacan’s “Real”. Not only would this reduce Johnson to evidence in the case

for Lacan’s unfalsifiable project, but it would also tell us nothing about Johnson and

return us to the bourgeois position from which he appears to lack the necessary

education and verbosity to engage in literary debate of merit. By drawing a comparison

with Lacan’s Real, we are rather tackling a question of ideological difference and the

role that “truth” plays in Johnson’s position as working class literary innovator. If

“truth” does take the position of an absent imperative then each of Johnson’s

narratives represent an ideological allegory journeying towards that imperative. The

class aspect of this ideological-cultural production is identified by Tew in his Johnson

monograph when he writes that “formal experimentalism serves to function as an

ongoing perceptual recognition of the nature of things, for reality and consequently

truth lie at the heart of the enterprise that moves toward a perception of the concrete

and material” (11). Johnson’s revelatory mode of literary experimentalism privileges

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“truth” in an anti-academic manner in a violent materialist break from idealism. That

his innovations are “directed specifically towards an idea of greater verisimilitude”

(Tew, 11) identifies a key distrust of totalising texts and drives the reader toward the

material which, like Lacan’s Real, can never be reached by the author-figure but can

only be approached and directed towards. Functionally, this materialist alienation is

conducted in the manner of the physical book as a “constant reminder”, described by

White as something that “ultimately strikes against the homogenisation of

representation and any critically sanctioned surrender to the economy of perception

which assimilates texts only to other texts, not texts to life” (117). The truth-imperative

is untheorised by necessity as it acts as a call to authenticity and sincerity regarding

material conditions beyond the textual. Johnson’s materialism is embodied in the

“blown fuse” of narrative collapse. The self-perpetuating engines of elite culture are

being dismantled from within.

The imperative towards “truth” is not only important due to its role in creating

Johnson’s particular materialist metatextuality, but also on account of its class-cultural

sentiment. The “defiant moral courage” (314) that it seems to summarise – far more

than any theoretical inclination – returns us to Hoggart’s study and another of the

virtues central to working class ideology beside self-respect; sincerity. Sincerity is relied

on “precisely because it does give some sort of measure in a world where measure is

otherwise very difficult to find” (195). As a virtue, sincerity places value in the subject

in absence of any claims to objectivity. Johnson’s “truth of my truth” can be seen to

follow this; implying that academic claims to objectivity are often actually

institutionalised subjective values reinforcing a bourgeois Establishment. Sincerity links

Johnson’s many statements on the importance of innovation within literature too.

Alongside the paradigm of truth-seeking in the introduction to Aren’t You Rather…,

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Johnson lists those “writing as though it mattered” – their works representing an effort,

rather than being praiseworthy in themselves – as well as suggesting that the attempt

to write in good faith is also central to the social good as the traditionalist “cannot

legitimately or successfully embody present-day reality in exhausted forms” (16). For

Johnson, the novelist, “if he [sic] is serious, will be making a statement which attempts

to change society towards a condition he conceives to be better, and he will be making

at least implicitly a statement of faith in the evolution of the form in which he is

working” (16). Social concern, concern for literature as a form, and personal integrity

are united in the act of writing “as though it mattered” and, as such, demand a level of

sincerity that is of-itself valuable beyond academic formalisations of quality and is

rather “true” on the grounds of being the most authentic that it is possible to be.

2.5: Turning Towards Terror

With these insights into Johnson’s particular working class experimentalism in mind,

we may now begin to look again at his most outwardly political novel, Christie Malry…,

and reconsider some of the tensions latent within it that are also present within the

archive material. In my paper, “Cell of One” (2014), I read Christie Malry… as a

culmination of a political journey into radicalism that encapsulates both B.S. Johnson’s

own life trajectories and wider cultural-economic trends within post-war Britain. As

well as the economic downturn, conservative government and the Industrial Relations

Act, aspects foremost in my own reading of Johnson’s radicalisation, Coe’s biography

also traces a series of insights around this period that create for Johnson the

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impression that, as Zulfikar Ghose wrote to him in a letter dated 22nd June 1970, “the

dark ages are approaching, mate”. Coe describes how in 1969, Johnson staged a

screening of Paradigm, one of his most typically “avant garde” films featuring a

character moving through stages of life speaking an invented language. The “young,

highly politicised audience, in the aftermath of the wave of student unrest which have

swept through Europe” proceeded to greet the film with “boos and catcalls” (263).

Faced by this kind of humiliation due to a perceived bourgeois pretentiousness,

Johnson’s film-making never quite returns to the highly conceptual material like

Paradigm that had earlier won him high praise.

In fact, Johnson’s television plays of 1971 see a return to autobiographical

material in Not Counting the Savages and, most interestingly considering Christie

Malry…, a piece about a member of a “dedicated minority nationalist movement” (319)

released after imprisonment for terrorism entitled What is the Right Thing and am I

Doing it?. The climax of the film sees Ghent, the terrorist figure, approaching the

offices of a newspaper with a suitcase implied to be filled with explosives. In the

climactic reveal, the editor throws the case from the window only for it to be filled with

pieces of paper - “Ghent’s poetic output” – which, for Coe at least, implies that it is

literature which is the “real incendiary device” (321). Considering Christie Malry… ends

with a seemingly opposite message – “you shouldn’t be writing novels about it, you

should be out there bloody doing something about it” (180) – we can perhaps also take

from the film the message that attempts to write a radical, oppositional literature will

be metaphorically as well as literally “thrown out of the window” by the literary

Establishment. In such a manner both What is the Right Thing… and Christie Malry…

share the theme of fatalistic radical commitment in the face of despair.

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 In Johnson’s researches during this period – those which make their way into

both of these works – the attraction to terrorist figures as both alienated from society

and yet powerfully immersed within it can be seen to explain much of Johnson’s

reticence in recognising any explicitly political potential in books. In an interview with

Alan Burns in The Imagination on Trial he talks of how “in England I don’t think books

can change anything. Here if you want to change things you’ve got to throw bombs or

work through Parliament” (88). Essentially Johnson is eschewing belief in working class

political organisation here and reducing the roles of “us and them” to the “them” of

the Establishment in parliament and the “us” of the individual divided from society.

The product of “meritocracy” that sees Johnson “stuck between classes” is embodied

in a political distrust of collectivism and an elevation of self-respect and personal

commitment to the level of total renunciation of others. Looking at Johnson’s notes

concerning the ideal Urban Guerrilla (“UG”) transcribed by Coe we see many of the

earlier aspects of Johnson’s attitudes to “self-respect” transformed into combat tactics;

“The UG must live by his work or professional activity,” like Johnson’s attitude to his

career – “The UG must be very searching and knowledgeable about the area in which

he lives or operates”, like Johnson’s literary use of space to encapsulate his “truth” –

and “The UG should… expropriate capitalist funds” (317), as Johnson managed through

his entry into literary councils and funding bodies. Johnson’s fascination with The Angry

Brigade, and their role in inspiring Christie Malry... described in my paper, could

perhaps be explained by this radical reimagining that Johnson was undertaking, rather

than any particular attraction to the libertarian communist ideals of the terrorist group

itself. The “cell of one” against “Them” was better expressed by total outsiders than by

class interests.

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 Yet Johnson’s reading of “Them” could not be more typically working class in its

origins. Hoggart describes how working class community solidarity arises “partly from

the feeling that the world outside is strange and often unhelpful, that it has most of the

counters stacked on its side, that to meet it on its own terms is difficult. One may call

this… the world of ‘Them’” (72). Tew, in his monograph, identifies Johnson’s fullest

description of the class dynamic in his childhood reminiscences in Trawl where he

writes that “the class war is being fought as viciously and destructively of human spirit

as it has ever been in England: I was born on my side, and cannot and will not desert”

(53). For Tew, this revelatory moment and its material setting are inextricably linked as

“the vocabulary of the reminiscence matches the wartime circumstances of the

memory, providing an irony with its suggestion of a deeper, ongoing supplementary

conflict” (95). The war against Germany may have taken the young Johnson out of his

working class London surroundings, but only to land him on the wrong side of a

different conflict – deep behind enemy lines in the British class war. In a way this

represents much of Johnson’s relationship with the British middle class during his later

years; given access to their surroundings in going to university and having his novels

published, yet never truly being one of them.14

Following the argument that Johnson’s own infatuation with terrorism can be

taken as a reflection of his own uncomfortable position “between classes”, it is possible

to read a certain prehistory of Christie Malry… through Johnson’s notebooks which will

tell us a lot about this novel as a work both intensely radical and fatalistically self-

defeating in intent. As Coe writes in his biography, the initial ideas for Johnson’s novels
14
Another highly evocative example of Johnson’s class position amongst “Them” can be seen in his third
notebook in which he makes a note of the middle class phrase “very comfortable people”. Clearly the
phrase had struck him as worthy of writing down to be used elsewhere. The intention behind its future
usage is demonstrated by an erratic, almost furious scribbling underlining of the word “comfortable”.
The euphemistic language of the middle class is clearly the opposite of what Johnson would consider
“truth”.

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often appear a number of years before he sets about writing or even planning to write

them. In the case of Christie Malry… the initial plan can be seen to appear on page 51

of Johnson’s seventh notebook, placing it sometime after 1964. However, going back to

Johnson’s fifth notebook - begun in the early sixties as he is beginning to return to his

working class heritage with the most enthusiasm – there appears an entry entitled

“Interview with Father Joe 6/5/63” which seems to act as a precursor to the later

plan.15 A hundred pages before the interview, what appears to be the idea for

conducting it is written down;

Now – consciously working-class – eating fish and chips by the river, throwing
bones and skin to the swans – eager to know about my father’s youth – talk his
language to him instead of revolting out (61).

During a rumination on class and his place within it, Johnson turns to his father as a

figure of both authority and authenticity on such matters. That Johnson’s father was

called “Stanley” suggest that the interview with “Father Joe” may have been conducted

with a “father figure” to save Johnson from addressing his actual father with such

questions. Johnson’s notes reflect aspects of his own politics that are perhaps notable

to him for existing in the working class contrary to the beliefs of middle class liberals;

ideas like “no colour prejudice” and that to “need someone to follow” is a “naïve

attitude” (168). He also comments on one of Johnson’s personal favourite topics,

housing, suggesting that “People respond to better housing. Evil comes to evil – like

rats to a dead body” (167). Following a comment that the “state should look after”

those “weak in the head” (167) there is the general idea that they “got sloppy with

Welfare State” (168); perhaps reflecting a conservative view but, judging by the
15
It may be argued that the “Interview with Father Joe” is in fact an internal dialogue that Johnson was
having with himself, or with a character. However, the rushed note-taking style of its presentation and
the fact that this technique of character development is not notable anywhere else would make this
reading far less likely than assuming that the interview actually occurred – especially when Johnson’s
background in journalism and his commitment to “truth” (especially regarding his actual trip on a trawler
for Trawl) is also factored in.

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context, more likely suggesting that Labour did not go far enough. Then, the page after

this encounter with working class socialist sentiments, Johnson writes the idea: “Story

of Father Joe type who goes mad + starts blowing up slums?” (169). Is this reaction

Johnson’s own impatience with politics projected onto someone else in the form of

“going mad”, or is it a sign of his alienation from the working class that casts it as self-

defeating; “blowing up slums”? Either way, the explosive class-war imagination of B.S.

Johnson seems to have its roots in the same class ambivalence as much of his writing

and experience, albeit at the extreme end of his emotional scale. Perhaps we can then

consider Johnson’s attraction to the motif of terrorism as equal and opposite to his

attraction to modernist fragmentation; faced by bourgeois rootlessness he responds

with a “blown fuse”, faced by proletarian despair he responds with a lit fuse.

Conclusion

In conclusion, when we consider B.S. Johnson as a working class experimental writer

and a product of the post-war welfare state many of the contradictions which exist

within his writing cease to be purely formal but rather embed him within his historical

moment. By investigating the relevance of class within Johnson’s works we are

provided not only with a clearer perspective on the works themselves but upon the

Johnsonian experimental drive as a potentially liberatory aesthetic. The radical

reorientation of form in the direction of an authentic contemporary experience

represents an imperative shared by all of the Sixties Experimental Novelists. It is

Johnson’s characteristic bluntness, however, that makes him both the primary

spokesperson and favoured scapegoat for critics wishing to engage with non-traditional

post-war writing without having to face the very real challenges that it poses to the

traditions of the British literary establishment.

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Chapter 3: “Without Taboos There Can Be No Tragedy”: Spectres of War and Rituals of

Peace in the Work of Eva Figes

3.1 Eva Figes as a Post-War Writer

The consequences of the Second World War loomed large over the Sixties in a variety

of ways. The founding of the Welfare State had established a social democratic

consensus in national politics which radically altered many people’s lives for the better.

By the same token, the Cold War and the legacy of the atom bomb daily threatened

those same people with nuclear apocalypse. The wartime practice of rationing food

was only completely ended in 1954 when meat became freely available and

conscription – or “National Service” as it was dubbed in peacetime – only came to an

end in 1960, with the last conscripts being released in 1963. Philip Tew, in The

Contemporary British Novel, addresses the importance of the war on literature,

suggesting that, “The literary culture which dominated English life since the mid-

Victorian period… survived intact until the Second World War” (8). As well as direct

responses to “post-war” conditions, such as the B.S. Johnson-edited collection All Bull:

The National Servicemen, the lingering impact of world conflict retains a latent power

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throughout Sixties culture. The extent to which that power is felt among the subjects of

this thesis, however, is dependent upon the writer in question.

As a shared context, “post war” is a difficult term to apply to the experimental

novelists of the Sixties biographically. Ann Quin, for example, was only nine years old in

1945 whilst Christine Brooke-Rose was working in Bletchley Park. B.S. Johnson writes in

Trawl and The Evacuees of the trauma caused to him by evacuation during wartime,

whilst Eva Figes’ 1978 reflections on her wartime experiences are unashamedly titled

Little Eden. The sense of novelty that J.G. Ballard sought to evoke in his many

dicussions of the war as a watershed moment in the Western cultural imagination can

be seen to position later developments under the shadow of that event. Indeed, the

simple description of these novelists as “post-war writers” immediately raises a

number of questions not only about what role the war played in these writers’

imaginations, but what role it played in the national imagination at that time as well,

and even if such generalisations are possible with any amount of accuracy.

The “generation gap” is one of the most widely returned to tropes in Sixties

culture. Partly this emphasis on new “youth movements” serves to draw attention to a

new form of consumerism permitted by post-war prosperity by which an increase in

disposable income encouraged experiments in living patterns, or “lifestyle”. However, it

also draws attention to the lingering effect of austerity (and its incumbent uniformity)

upon the national imagination; a break from which is symbolised by the “youth” upon

whom a sense of decadence and irresponsibility was projected. In the volume of her

memoirs entitled Walking in the Shade, Doris Lessing recounts this Britain of “the late

1940s, the early 1950s [which] has vanished, and now it is hard to believe it existed…

No cafes. No good restaurants. Clothes were still ‘austerity’ from the war, dismal and

ugly. Everyone was indoors by ten, and the streets were empty” (122). It is against this
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“excessive” uniformity that the “excessive” exuberance of the Sixties can be seen to

rebel. Above any concrete and material differences between generations, however, the

overarching importance of the “generation gap” is its ability, as a symbolic discourse, to

impose itself upon all topics of debate. The two concepts of the “generation gap” and

the “post-war” resonate with highly emotive and conflicting implications within the

Sixties cultural imagination. In public discourse the “older generation” are caricatured

as backward and set in their ways and the “younger generation” as ungratefully reaping

the rewards of wartime sacrifice. In order to engage with the radical aspirations of

Sixties culture in Britain, it is therefore necessary to discuss “The War” and the long

shadow it casts over British society.

Among the writers studied in this thesis, the war’s most dramatic impact can be

felt in the work of Eva Figes. Figes is a writer of memoirs and critical studies as well as

novels, many of which engage with the Second World War; Little Eden (1978), Tales of

Innocence and Experience (2004), and Journey to Nowhere (2008) all directly relating

her and her family’s experiences as Jews that fled Berlin for Britain in 1939, while in

1993 she edited the collection Women’s Letters in Wartime, 1450-1945 dealing with

women’s wartime experiences across history. Although these works are published

much later than her early experimental novels, the many distinct attitudes, interests

and experiences elaborated within them draw upon a common root which holds true

throughout her literary career.

In concentrating specifically upon Eva Figes’ work in the Sixties, it is necessary

to first understand the rationale by which she approached her experimental aesthetic.

Although outspoken in her rejection of “experimental” as a label for her novels, she

nevertheless positioned herself as part of a group attempting to do something new

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with the novel. Looking back in 1985, she lists B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin and Alan Burns

as fellow members of this group with “very different talents and preoccupations, but

we shared a common credo, a common approach to writing” (“B.S. Johnson”, 70).

Never fully elaborated in a theoretical or manifesto form, Figes’ approach revolves

around the discovery “that life was not conscious, that the novels of the past were

portraying a false reality” (Imagination on Trial, 33). The effects of this unconsciousness

appear in an unpublished and undated piece, “Prosaic”, written roughly during this

period, in which Figes laments “we have outgrown ourselves. Sit, bored and alienated,

watching astronauts float about in black space on television”. 16 Against this malaise,

Figes proposed a new form of writing which would “make a direct emotional impact

[and] break through the rational prose structures” (Imagination on Trial, 35). For Figes,

such innovation was necessary, not only in terms of the future of literature and culture,

but also for society. In order to change society, one had to change perception, and it is

in this interest that Figes believed aesthetic formal innovation played a central role;

“We need new statements. New models of reality… I have found myself increasingly

involved in making new connections, creating new networks… I am using a different

grid” (“Note”, 114). In the experimental novels of Eva Figes, perception and reality are

fundamentally bound together by imposed structures, and it is a prerequisite of any

authentic work that it encounters these structures on its own terms, negotiates and

reworks them. It is in relation to these revolutionary “new models” that the works of

Eva Figes, at first glance strikingly poetic, are by the same measure deeply political as

well.

3.2: Eva Figes’ Anthropological Feminism

16
“Prosaic” was, at the time of writing, held in the British Library and appears in a file containing various
loose papers dated between 1968 and 1972.

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When engaging Eva Figes as a political, experimental novelist in the context of the

(Long) Sixties, it is impossible not to mention her critical positioning within the feminist

canon. Published in 1970, chronologically central to the novels studied here, her

academic work Patriarchal Attitudes was, and arguably remains, Figes’ most famous

work. Alongside Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Figes’ polemic has come to

define the “Second Wave” of British feminism which exploded into prominence in

1970. Subsequent reviews of her novels tend to identify her primarily as a feminist

writer. When writing her bio for Twentieth-Century British and Irish Fiction, Juliette

Wells concentrates on her “steady interest in representing the experience of both

ordinary and extraordinary women [that] places her among the most important

feminist novelists of the late twentieth century” (124). Friedman and Fuchs name her

next to Gertrude Stein, Christine Brooke-Rose and Kathy Acker as “undermining the

patriarchal assumptions that inform [traditional] narrative modes” (4) in their book

Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Indeed, the premise of their

book, that “the rupturing of traditional forms becomes a political act, and the feminine

narrative resulting from such rupture is allied with the feminist project” (4), provides

perhaps the strongest framework for reading Figes’ experimental novels in literary

criticism so far, in spite of the study itself focusing upon her work directly only

occasionally. This relationship between structure and politics is especially relevant

when we consider the positions taken in feminist discourse not just by Figes herself,

but by much of the Long Sixties feminist movement.

In a short essay analysing the development of feminism post-1945, Pat Thane

identifies Figes’ contemporaries as proponents of “a more radical strand of feminism”

(204). The beginnings of this new wave of activism are seen to emerge from other

radical movements during 1968 including “the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the
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Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and various socialist organisations”. By 1969 “there were

70 local women’s liberation groups in London” and by 1970, “the first national

Women’s Liberation Workshop, held in Oxford…drew 600 delegates” (204). Once Eva

Figes’ book Patriarchal Attitudes had become associated with a central group of

representative texts in both reviews of contemporary feminism and Eva Figes’ works,

the connection itself then became a staple of Figes’ own novels’ covers, in turn

encouraging this identification. A telling review by Michael P. Fogarty appearing in the

Catholic Herald and focusing on “feminism today” in 1973, positioned Figes’ book next

to books by Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Juliet Mitchell, and others as

works forming a new “movement”. The novel idea at the centre of this movement is, in

Fogarty’s words, “if the network of social relationships in the community and the

extended family, which traditionally took the strain and isolation out of the nuclear

family is being weakened or dissolved, what new social as well as family structures shall

we put in its place?” (152). Although writing “as a Catholic”, Fogarty nevertheless

identifies the structuralist aspect that these new analyses bring to ideas such as social

and family “breakdown”. Such a concentration upon structural inequalities is in keeping

with the social democratic mode of political discourse hegemonic in Britain during the

Sixties. Debates were framed around “the Role of Women”, implying a certain

paternalist perspective, whilst demands surrounding equal pay, liberalised legislation

and NHS support inevitably involve the discourses of a managed economy.

In Patriarchal Attitudes, the success of Figes’ political intervention into debates

surrounding structural inequality, both economic and cultural, is to demonstrate how

such inequalities are deeply rooted in Western culture, their forms and features

shifting through time but an essential patriarchal undercurrent remaining throughout.

The difference between this approach and that of the women’s rights movements of
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the older generation could perhaps be demonstrated in the legislation regarding

women’s issues during the respective periods as collected by Cook and Stevenson.

Where 1945’s Family Allowances Act, alongside the provision of free healthcare by the

NHS in 1948, could be considered victories for women in terms of redistributing wealth

around the nuclear family hierarchy, the Abortion Act (1967), Family Planning Act

(1967), Divorce Act (1969), Equal Pay Act (1970), and Sex Discrimination Act (1975)

provide material and legislative bolsters towards the liberation of women from the

material foundations of the hierarchy itself.

Other than positioning her as part of the contemporary feminist movement,

considering the structuralist influences in Figes’ feminist writing can perhaps also allow

us to reflect on the construction of her characters and the fictional worlds inhabited by

them within her novels. In a 1988 interview with Laurel Graeber, Figes refused to

classify her novels as feminist, suggesting that she is “more concerned with women’s

emotions. Women don’t stop feeling vulnerable because of feminism”(9). However,

considering the determinism implicit in much of Figes’ feminist polemical works – one

particularly potent example being that, “at some stage a woman has to make a choice

between her own ambition and her marriage, and in the eyes of society there is in fact

only one choice to be made. A girl of fifteen knows both about the choice and what the

answer is” (Patriarchal Attitudes, 171) – women’s emotional responses to the concrete

restraints of society is itself a form of politicised despair through implication. Where

some feminist writers of the period, most notably Angela Carter, would place an

emphasis upon strong female characters as a means of disrupting patriarchal literary

expectations, Figes concentrates upon depicting her characters as historical subjects.

Featuring both male and female protagonists, her novels are careful delineations of

character, place and time – aspects amalgamated through the experience of

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perception. While Figes’ characters retain the total psychological depth one would

expect of a modernist stream-of-consciousness writer, they also – through memory,

dream, and metaphor – display the manner in which they are historically constituted as

political subjects. A key historical parallel with this aspect of Figes’ writing can be found

in the early 1970s project of feminist anthropology. Drawing upon the methodology of

contemporary ethnographic studies as a basis for studying women’s position within

Western society, the strength of such an academic project lay in its similar ability to

demonstrate the historical conditions informing the present moment. As a result,

patriarchal society is shown to be contingent, not fixed.

One example of feminist anthropology can be seen in Ann Oakley’s 1972 study

Sex, Gender and Society. Oakley collects a number of anthropological cases as the basis

of a feminist argument against patriarchal expectations of gender roles. The questions

she asks are, “What generalisations can be made about the rules for allocating tasks

and roles by sex? And what rules are made in practice by differing societies, including

our own?”, with the result that “as each assumption is taken in turn, the appearance of

biological necessity comes to seem more mythical than real” (131). From the almost

indeterminable biological differences between genders in foetuses, to the Mbuti for

whom “the role of biology as a determinant of social role and status seem negligible”

(149), and the Kikuyu whose men “spend most of their time in crafts and other

activities” (141) whilst women perform the “traditionally masculine” labour roles;

Oakley presents one of the most comprehensive collections of social variants within

her contemporary feminist discourse and, like Figes in Patriarchal Attitudes, uses this to

dispute patriarchal claims of biologically inherent gender roles.

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 For Figes, this use of anthropology in feminism represents western society

“just…beginning to realise the enormous importance of environment, not only with

regard to men and women, but with regard to one human being and another”

(Patriarchal Attitudes, 15). However, the central theme of her book is not that

Enlightenment Reason will allow women to liberate themselves through the academic

demonstration of their equality, but rather that the “environment” which shapes “one

human being and another” historically will find a means of shaping contemporary

discourse to fit with patriarchal attitudes, not vice versa. “The attitudes are adapted,

but remain fundamentally what they had been for generations”, she writes, whilst

“even highly able and original minds will continue to justify a state of affairs which is

advantageous” (111). Robert Fraser, addressing the problem of anthropology itself

being shaped to fit discourse, writes in the introduction to James George Fraser’s The

Golden Bough, “taboos are fences around cultures, guide-posts to provinciality,

definitions of belonging and place… they inform us, whether through inclusion or else

through exclusion, of who we are” (x). It is a similar argument to Figes’ and one that

would account for the disparities between uses of anthropology which threaten to

undermine particularly polemical approaches such as Oakley’s. For example, Jung’s

anthropological formulation of literature compares it to “the men’s councils and totum

clans [that] preserve the knowledge, and it is handed down to the younger men in the

rites of initiation” (113) – a function Figes’ novels can perhaps be read antithetically

against – whilst Woolf, a noted inspiration for Figes, compares official church and state

regalia, “pieces of metal, or ribbon, coloured hoods or gowns, [to]a barbarity which

deserves the ridicule which we bestow upon the rites of savages” (179). 17 Even in the

Levi-Strauss inspired area of anthropology-related linguistics Christine Brooke-Rose and

17
See Juliette Wells for the Woolf/Figes connection.

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Umberto Eco find language to be respectively socially variable and intrinsically

gendered (Invisible Author). The line that Figes takes in Patriarchal Attitudes that, in the

field of discourse, anthropology may provide examples but never answers, could

therefore be considered an important variation on the theme of feminist anthropology.

Similarly, it is through the lens of a historically constituted model of society that we can

return to Figes’ experimental intention to outline “new models of reality” and create

“new networks” through her stylistic and formal innovation. Figes’ experimental works

can be seen as exercises of consciousness-raising through alterations in the mode of

presentation.

Figes, in pursuing new modes, seems at times to be consciously playing with the

masculine tradition of psychological discourse. The romantic relationship between the

protagonist’s daughter and doctor in Days utilises the imagery of “mysterious” (62)

love, emotions that “weighed like a lead ball… in my chest” (61). Her lover, the object

of those desires, is described as “like my father, being a man, imponderable… there was

something about the breed I had not reckoned with till now” (62). Framed by the

masculine tradition and its clichéd Freudian interpretations, the supposedly natural

romantic ruminations of the young woman seem to be reflecting literary conventions

rather than spontaneous emotion. The pseudo-anthropological imagery becomes far

more emphasised in relation to the mother figure. Sat in her hospital bed engaging in

reveries of her own, she nevertheless becomes “some sort of monument, a statue. A

stiffened lap figure in a perpetual sitting posture, arms deprived of hands, extensions of

wood which are able to accept but not touch, not hold, not grasp” (92). Suggesting

“primitivist” sculpture of the Henry Moore variety, Figes is drawing on tribal imagery

but with a retained awareness of how such imagery is processed and filtered into

Western culture. The “eternal figure with brave shoulders but no head. Mother,
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woman, as man has carved her out of wood or stone” (92) exists as a great inactive

monolith, both in physical appearance and as a symbol of motherhood. The

relationships between these characters are redirected through the symbolic structures

that give them social meaning as archetypes, rather than living organisms. The weight

of social expectations intervenes between relationships and asserts a patriarchal

dynamic.

Figes enlists the imagery of the “primitive” as a key poetic device for imprinting

history into her otherwise contemporary narratives in serious ways as well. The most

protracted example of this technique opens the novel Konek Landing; “it began where

the tide ran,” she writes, “the water rocking, air and water and air; there, you might

say, the cradle of life” (9). Beginning a novel ostensibly about the genocidal condition

of wartime Europe with the beginning of life itself places the rest within an

uncomfortable yet sublime perspective. Before the end of the first paragraph we reach,

“creatures with legs to carry them moved up the beach and stayed there” (10), by the

second we have, “a four-legged creature pulled himself upright on two legs, tottered

but balanced finally, and swung himself into the safety of the trees” (11), before the

third paragraph introduces a man “left…alone to find his way back with two pin-points

of light” (12). Stylistically, the fixation upon the minutiae of moving water across a

beach does much to suggest Wells’ comparison of Figes’ prose to Woolf’s; from this

perspective one could arguably read the introduction as an exercise in modernist

stream-of-consciousness describing the mental state of one inspired by their

surroundings. However, reading this as an actual description of the history of life until

the point at which the protagonist, Stefan Konek, is stood upon the beach does more

than create a poetical distancing of the mind but rather inspires an existential panic

that emphasises both a grandness of scale and also an insignificance by comparison.

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There is a sense in which Figes’ interest in anthropological history – a history of

humanity’s deepest structures - is no mere fuel for rhetoric, but a despairing realisation

that the weight of history is greater than the rational mind and the cause-and-effect

logic of current events.

Anthropological history not only features in Figes’ novels as a powerful

metaphor, however, as could perhaps be said of these two examples, but arguably lies

central to the imaginative frameworks Figes is using to construct her free-flowing

narratives. Her thoughts on the interrelationship of social relations and historical

structures are most firmly voiced in her 1976 work of literary criticism, Tragedy and

Social Evolution. In this study, Figes brings many of her ideas from Patriarchal Attitudes

to bear upon another critical tradition: the history of tragedy. Although the work

engages with Aristotle, Sophocles and Shakespeare with a careful eye to unpacking

their archetypical patriarchal themes, its central underlying argument posits tragedy

and its narrative structures as inherently linked to human social rituals dating back into

prehistory. The argument is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy at

many points, in spite of the philosopher’s name being mentioned only twice in the

book - and then only to highlight the rampant misogyny driving his arguments. But

Nietzsche’s attribution of tragedy’ s power to “the ecstatic sound of the Dionysiac

revels [echoing] ever more enticingly around this world built on illusion and

moderation” (26), with “its constant conflicts and only periodically intervening

reconciliations” (14) reflecting “the reproduction of the species [dependant] on the

duality of the sexes” (14) is equally present in Figes’ study, albeit approached from a

critical position. As a study, Tragedy and Social Evolution describes the subtextual

implications of tragedy as distinct formulations of pre-rational thought patterns. It

verges on Freud’s description of an archaic “omnipotence of thoughts” wherein

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“relations which hold between the ideas of things are deemed to hold equally between

the things themselves” (99) – the fatalism that drives tragic narrative is more powerful

than the characters who can only look on in horror at their fates unwinding. Tragedy,

and related art forms that draw upon its dramatic structures, are connected to

something unconscious that, for Figes and the intertexts upon which she is drawing,

foregoes the rational in favour of emotional resonance.

For Figes, this investigation into the irrational core of tragedy is not an end in

itself; it is part of a critical feminist engagement with patriarchal society. In the rational

age, “thunder ceases to be a divine portent and becomes mere electricity”, she writes,

yet “without taboos there can be no tragedy”, and tragedy is an essential ritual for

social evolution; “it is for this reason that there is only one truly tragic subject in

Western literature after the seventeenth century, and that is woman” (Tragedy and

Social Evolution, 138). The symbol of “woman” within patriarchal society is a figure

formed not by “what her mother desired for herself, but what her father and all men

find desirable in a woman. Not what she is, but should be” (Patriarchal Attitudes, 17). It

is here where Figes’ credentials as a feminist writer, called into question by her own

assertion that she “is more concerned with women’s emotions” are united in her

experimental desire for a “different grid”. This project is vocalised in Tragedy and Social

Evolution as she describes that,

“there is still a strong prejudice against women in a more controlling position,

and particularly against female dramatists, because any woman writer who is
worth anything would present an image of women, and perhaps more
devastatingly, an image of men, which does not fit in with the male consensus
on what men and women are really like” (99).

In redressing this imbalance through the novel form, Figes is engaging in a

reconfiguration of emotional structures that have formed society based on the male

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consensus throughout western history. As an experimental practice, this intention

positions these novels as blueprints for a potential future literature. As she writes in

Beyond the Words; “the artist provides messages about the nature of reality which, if

he is successful, become internalised by one or more generation and become accepted

as reality itself” (114). Her search for “new models of reality” is a recalibration drawn

from a feminine perspective, yet with a revolutionary mandate to alter all

consciousness.

Such a mandate is most fully appreciable in novels like B, a work where the

plot’s focus is so masculine-oriented it could almost belong to a Kingsley Amis novel. A

commercially successful writer visits the house of his recently deceased, commercially

unsuccessful and yet stylistically brilliant friend, B, and struggles with his own legacy in

the face of superior masculine competition. The writers’ voice is that of the

unreconstructed, bitter misogynist: “Women are supposed to love love above

everything else, the sentimental little dears, but don’t you believe it. Wherever a

capitalistic consumer society flourishes on the torn guts of humanity, cherchez la

femme. It’s because they’re not creative, all they can do is latch on to some poor devil

of a man” (35). Within the bluster and the clichéd gripes, however, Figes also skilfully

presents the writer’s incomprehension, his alienation from his wife as a fully-formed

human being. At one moment he describes her as “revolving like a helpless satellite”,

the next he betrays himself as he “attempts to imagine what [her] life could be” (13)

beyond her relationship with him, drawing a blank. As a “wife”, she exists rather as an

object than a person. As an object, she exists as a sexual commodity to the extent that,

in a discussion with his dead competitor B on the subject of women, she enters the

dreamlike sequence and has sex with B in front of him. It is only at this point, when he

is losing his sole proprietary right to the possessed object that “the memory of
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Martha’s body” - addressing his wife by name - intrudes upon his emotions, “[a

memory] that I have not allowed to intrude for a long time. I thought I had buried it

with distaste years ago” (39). In delving into the misogynistic valuation of women only

in relation to relationships between men, Figes demonstrates how patriarchal

structures inhibit and deform the masculine imagination as well as the feminine. The

hollow and affectless existence that the male protagonist is shown struggling with

throughout the novel appears almost as the inverse of that evoked in Equinox – Figes

first novel which deals with a year in the life of a housewife. From Figes’ perspective,

concerned with the deep structures shaping society through history, the sexist is as

much a subject of patriarchy as the housewife. It is in the creation of “new models of

reality” through formal innovation which foregrounds such contradictions of the

patriarchal hierarchy and inspires revolutionary change.

3.3: The War and Women’s Experience

Once we have understood how Figes’ feminine poetics allow her to engage with her

narratives from a historical perspective, grounded in anthropology and a tragic

tradition, in order to imbue them with a particular feminist discourse, we can finally

return to the question of the Second World War and how the memory of that conflict

impacts upon the content of her novels. Writing in the introduction to her edited

collection of Women’s Letters in Wartime, she describes how “war is not experienced in

isolation. Usually it goes on for months or years, and gets inextricably bound up with

our ordinary lives, one way or another. If, like me, you were a child during the second

world war, which went on for six years, then it was ordinary life” (13). A conception of

“war” as frontline combat is, from Figes’ perspective, a hugely reductive notion; her

entire existence during the “war years” is as much defined by that event as a soldier’s.

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Her memoir Little Eden involves very little in terms of combat – occasional dogfights

above her school with resulting plane crashes – but the location of her childhood in a

new country, then evacuated from the city, as well as the poor clothes and food

resulting from shortages and rationing, all tie her childhood directly to “the War”, even

if this event is defined as something happening elsewhere.

The young Figes is placed in the alienating position of being defined by

something whilst essentially being kept away from it; its recognised reality being

elsewhere. A central aspect of this alienation is doubled for Figes because of her

German origins. “I made a point of calling myself Jewish, partly because I felt that Hitler

had made me one, but also to avoid being labelled German”, she writes in Journey to

Nowhere, “the history of the Third Reich meant that I was absolved from wearing the

badge of shame” (82). Although, being from a secular Jewish family, a concrete idea of

what the label meant eluded her, according to Little Eden, rather it was a distancing

device that allowed her to fit in with the other children who “strutted and goose-

marched round the playground, making sputtering guttural noises which were

supposed to sound like German” (54), her first language. The aspect of words and

naming being used both to trace and to sever someone from their origins carries many

potent implications within a totemistic conception of the world, yet it is also a potent

dramatic technique. Konek Landing, for example, sees its protagonist, Stefan Konek,

placed into the hands of strangers for protection, and as a means of disguising his

origins, they rename him Pavel Zuck, “and if anybody asks you, you will pretend you

have never even heard of Stefan Konek” (22). Equally, names become meaningless for

the protagonist of Winter Journey or “B”, the subject of the eponymous novel. The

alienation stems from the new context in which the former label demarcating the

individual’s identity suddenly becomes unspeakable - as if the totem has become taboo
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– and as a result, much of that which had previously been associated with identity is

made dubious by association. While being shaped by the war, Figes was evacuated

away from it, and despite having lived until the age of seven in Germany, she was

Jewish and thus not really German. By being defined against things, her experiences

somehow take on an illegitimate quality.

Another illegitimacy is attached to the Jewish evacuee on account of her youth.

The supposedly authentic experience of war, conceptualised through conflict and

sacrifice, is considered imaginatively beyond the child’s fathoming. Like most evacuees,

Figes was encouraged to remain innocent of the realities of war. Perhaps inevitably,

however, this led to resentment on the part of her mother who, as she writes in Little

Eden, rebuked her for not taking things seriously enough. “I told myself it was unfair,

how was I to know”, she writes, “and at the same time I felt it was all my fault, her

unhappiness, my unreasonableness, even the death of those I loved. From now on

there was no escape from the burden of guilt” (130). The echoes of Figes’ description

of women as the last unknowable subject for tragedy recur here, along with the

theoretical framework of tragedy as a means of socially integrating the inexplicable.

Individual subjectivity is emotionally defined by an alienation from older generations

and the weight of the past. It’s a mode that recurs in Figes’ characterisation of

intergenerational relationships, for example, the young girl in Days considers her

mother and is, as a result, “baffled, confused, knowing that what she does not know

cannot be told. It is too much for the mind to grasp” (32). In a larger sense alienation

also defines her characters’ relationship to the past, such as the protagonist in B who is

driven to write “not only by a wish to recapture the past, a sense of loss..., but by a

wish to confirm isolation in my physical surroundings. My wounds are the only way I

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now have of knowing I continue to exist” (107). There remains an unbridgeable gap

between generations which finds its ultimate rift in the shared trauma of conflict.

Feminist criticism made a number of reassessments of the war and its

aftermath as it developed through the Sixties. Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique,

published in 1962 and inspiring subsequent American women’s movements

concentrated upon “the problem that has no name” shared by many women who

appeared to be living the American dream; married with children and a stable home.

Voicing dissatisfaction within such a context, she argued, was tantamount to betraying

the national “pent-up hunger for marriage, home and children… felt simultaneously by

several different generations… which, in the prosperity of post-war America, everyone

could suddenly satisfy” (147). Ann Oakley, studying the British equivalent of this

phenomenon in 1974’s Housewife, adds to this emotional war-debt the new

concentration upon child-rearing which “makes ‘successful’ performance of the

maternal role crucial”, in spite of the fact that British “children are given an

extraordinary amount of attention when judged by the standards of other societies”

(67). The war had placed adult women in a position in which they were socially

considered to be both indebted to their husbands and owing to their children; a

situation engendering resentment on the part of all involved.

Drawing a dividing line between “wartime” and “post-war” generations,

however, is perhaps too totalising a gesture here. The tensions that the generational

disparities of experience engender can be seen in a more distinct light than simply

“experienced or not”. Figes is clear to make this case when she writes the introduction

to her edited collection of Women’s Letters in Wartime 1450-1945 – itself an exercise in

spanning generations – that whilst “war has always been seen as a male activity” and

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“feminists often try to distance their own gender from the whole awful business,” for

all the women who historically tried to stop the fighting, “other women were handing

out white feathers” (11). The burden of guilt regarding war is not one, for Figes, that

can be placed entirely upon men. Yet, neither could its turbulence and violence be

considered a purely masculine burden to bear either. A moment of reverie in Winter

Journey draws the protagonist back into war memories – “Stalingrad, that was a cold

place, the abdication, coronation, D-day, VE-day, any day” (24) – but soon moves past

the historically significant events and into a montage of violence as experienced by

women. The images of “that girl murdered in the signal-box”, “Sally Simpson coming to

work eight months gone”, “bloodstained knitting needles that wouldn’t shift it” (24),

disapproving parental figures and social pariah status, all collect into a far more

wartorn image than the list of recognised “war” events could conjure. Oppressed by

both wartime conditions and a patriarchy reinforced by wartime legitimacy, the

forgotten suffering of women during wartime perhaps adds to the gap between

generations, especially in terms of the perceived role of women. By utilising the novel

form, Figes can address the generational divide whilst engaging with the historical deep

structures which oppress both mothers and daughters. The experimental process of

“making new connections” allows her to present the lived experience of such

ideological contradictions in a manner stylistically unavailable to the writers of political

polemics.

The contextual differences between the feminisms of the wartime generation

and Figes’ “post-war” generation are thus a clear influence on their differing objectives

and focuses. Wartime, for example, brought with it conscription “which legally

compelled women to work [and] was introduced in Britain for the first time in

December 1941” (Hartley, 71). In her study of British women’s fiction during the
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Second World War, Jenny Hartley draws out many of the important consequences that

the massive increase in women’s labour power had to national output and national

consciousness. The nature of women’s labour as a vital social force, and thus women as

equal members of the public as well as the private sphere was directly implied by the

compulsory nature of this work as “its meaning came to lie more clearly outside itself

in its value to the nation” (72). This new consciousness of labour power and the social

and economic interests that surround it become, for Hartley, central to women’s

culture at this time; “work is the major topic of interest for most women writing about

their war experiences, and the publication of so many of those accounts at the time

suggests a widespread interest” (75). The new social and economic position of women

during wartime led to a huge interest in the experiences of others in work. United by a

sense of national purpose, earlier conceptions of women’s labour as the recourse of

the working class were challenged and along with them the notion of women’s

“traditional” role, albeit under a rubric of “duty” and a qualifying state of exception.

In addressing such a narrative of women’s collective wartime experience,

however, Eva Figes makes a point in Little Eden of upsetting the notion that labour was

an entirely new practice for all women in society. She describes how discussions

concerning the conscription of women for mandatory labour led to the conclusion in

parliament that “if we had indeed come to such a pass the women should at least get a

reasonable wage” (107). The proposal to pay “a shilling an hour”, however, “was

defeated after it had been pointed out that women land workers were being employed

for a mere 8d. an hour”; something that presented a “new and somewhat

embarrassing insight into the lives of working women” (107) for the Members of

Parliament expected to make such decisions. For some, this “embarrassing insight” was

even cause for patriarchal panic. Realising that an amendment to the Education Act of
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1944 which included equal pay for women teachers had been passed 117 votes to 116,

Winston Churchill abandoned the war room to enact a last minute veto. “Why the P.M.

was prepared to interrupt his preparations for D-day and, in the midst of London’s

heaviest bombing of the war, trouble to prevent teachers receiving equal pay,” in the

words of Pat Thane, “suggests the degree of feeling on both sides of the issue” (184).

Any new conception of “women” as a historical subject that came out of conscription,

a legitimate political category with its own shared interests and a will to fight for them

would have the worrying quality of applying across economic classes.

That the Equal Pay Act was not instituted until 1970 perhaps demonstrates the

dramatic social reaction which followed the end of the war and end of the state of

exception. Not only were the forces of reaction trenchant in their demands for a

“return to the home” but, according to Jane Lewis, wartime feminist movements were

equally complicit in this drive to promote motherhood under the lingering wartime

rubric of “national duty”. “On the whole”, she writes in Women in Britain Since 1945,

“post-war feminists accepted that women’s most vital task was that of motherhood”

(24). Symptomatic of this feeling was “a highly influential book, Women’s Two Roles,

conceptualised during the 1940s but not published until 1956” which argued that

“during the child-rearing years women should be with their children” (24). The motives

for this shift away from economic equality are theorised by Lewis as a focus upon

“social dislocation as the primary cause of [family] failure” coinciding with a reduction

in concerns over “the economic responsibility of the father” (19). Considering statistics

in the Economic History of Britain since 1700 place unemployment as a percentage of

the labour force at 1.8% in 1946, falling steadily to 1% by 1951 it could certainly be

argued that the case for “redomestication” of women emerged from convivial

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economic conditions.18 The same ideological imperatives driving the creation of the

welfare state – the “post-war consensus” – appear, for Lewis, to include the patriarchal

drive towards domestic “stability” as part of the masculine bias emergent in readings

of “The War”.

In terms of intergenerational relationships, this emphasis on increasing

women’s security as mothers reinforces the case of “legitimate” and “illegitimate”

experiences of war and the attendant feelings of guilt and responsibility. The unspoken

taboos reinforcing social hierarchies draw their power from the mother figure’s

sacrifice as both passive victims of war and active campaigners for better quality of life

for their children. This subtext is occasionally vocalised in Figes’ novels, although its

mouthpiece is always a member of the older generation – the younger must suffer the

matriarchal claims to obedience in silence. In Winter Journey the claims are entirely

feminised, the male protagonist being “too soft” on his career-minded daughter as,

according to his wife, “you didn’t ever mind what I had to go through, did you, all those

years in the war” (75). Whereas the father can allow for his daughter to attend art

school to study fashion design, he seeing her as “not stupid given encouragement”, the

idea of a career appears to the mother figure as “just a lot of fancy ideas she’ll grow

out of… then she’ll get married and that’ll be the end of that” (75). By emphasising the

matriarchal figure as the constrictive force, Figes demonstrates how the emotional

structure of patriarchal society relies upon constructions of obligation as opposed to

outright coercion. In the historical context of recent wartime experiences, the family

unit is valued as an achievement and, as such, the sacrifices that “paid” for its

construction can be used to demand its continuity.

18
These statistics represent what an economist would term “full employment”; the 1 to 2 per cent
unemployment rate accounting for “structural unemployment” inevitable in any system outside of
forced labour.

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 A large part of these validatory patriarchal myths surrounding the war exist

thanks to the successful recuperation of war memories into a hegemonic narrative

after the fact. In her study, Millions Like Us, Jenny Hartley identifies an almost

immediate move away from the wartime tropes in bestsellers after the war’s end. At

the head of this about-face from “the noble goals of the People’s War”, was Nancy

Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love which, according to Hartley, “gave unquestioned and

unabashed licence to the enjoyment of light-hearted pleasure, well-heeled romance

and snobbery” (198). The fictional escape from the aftermath of war and its attendant

values occurs equally in film, as Roger Manvell’s Films and the Second World War

attests: “British feature films on the whole left war alone until sufficient time had

elapsed to make the subject acceptable again in the light of reflection” (236). The

cultural industry’s move away from war appears like an act of purging the public

imagination for so long embedded in an environment of wartime uncertainties. The

return of decadence acts as an ideological celebration of victory in the face of the

actual austerity experienced by the majority of the nation, but equally it abandons the

political and social questions that war raises by creating a new attitude of social

permissiveness to “irresponsibility”. It is this attitude which, in the decade following,

can be seen to establish a set pattern of war’s representation. Writing in 1964, Albert

Hunt describes “irresponsibility” as the central mode by which the war is returned to;

the responsibility of the individual to society, art to truth, and a film’s responsibility to

express its message via suitable content are, for Hunt, abandoned. In the paperback

trade too, a wave of unprecedentedly violent conflict emerged both in terms of war but

also, in a genre popularised during the war itself, in “hard-boiled” detective stories.

Steve Holland recounts an interview in which one editor later expressed regret for

being involved in such publications as “imagination on the part of the authors often

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extended to violence during the sex act… such stories, while unpleasant, might have no

influence upon balanced readers, but with scores of these stories going out yearly, it

seemed to me to amount to a wave of propaganda” (108). In 1971’s Sexual Politics,

Kate Millet positions these texts – as well as the works of Mailer, Lawrence and Miller –

as part of “the masculine tradition of war and virility” (362). The roaring post-war trade

in actual pornography (of which Maurice Girodias, and by extension Burroughs and

Trocchi, were beneficiaries) would seem to justify such a theory. Outside of adult

literature, war stories were “given considerable prominence” in children’s publications,

according to Raymond William’s 1962 study Communications. In such stories the

combatants, “usually British and Nazis” (41), reduce the war to a cartoon conflict

between good and evil. Those depicting the war are stripped of any responsibility to

the politics of the conflict and the morality of mortal combat. This position is not only

amoral, however, but its implicit asocial message is that only “heroes” were involved in

war, so others’ experiences are illegitimate. Women and children’s role is limited at

most to sacrifice, that is, when their agency is even considered; it being secondary to

their archetypical role as the victims in need of rescue or protection from the warrior

hero – the dark side of which was visible in the pulp market. The realignment of war as

entertainment normalises a certain masculine domination which is only reinforced by a

two dimensional sense of morality.

As a result of war being seen as the domain of “heroes”, the lingering scars that

the war inflicted upon society become alienated from the hegemonic narrative and

exist in a haunted state. These uncomfortable realities are traced in many of the

settings in Figes’ novels. In Winter Journey they take on what could even be considered

a form of pathetic fallacy. The final journey of a poverty-stricken old man creates a

unity of meaning between the present and the past in the novel, connecting the
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industrial slum area of the present with the war-torn landscape of the past not only in

terms of physicality. The “towers and motorways and old crusts of concrete edged with

grass and muck” (12) that form his town leave “dust harboured in wrinkles” from days

when “the station sign said C . . . Y to fool the enemy” (11) – the old man still hears the

train although to do so is physically impossible, “not without my aid on” (11). The

“plans to build a flyover here which would mean knocking down number twenty-four”

(34) lead him to reflect upon the church demolished ten years earlier where now there

is green space “chopped into two triangles with a road running through it and old

newspapers blowing across it” (35). The dark side of post-war prosperity and planning,

what Rees and Lambert describe as a tendency “to reinforce inequalities and

disparities which were longstanding features of the British social structure” (79), sees

the resultant planned demolition of community structures take place simultaneous to

bomb damage in the winding monologue that comprises the form of Winter Journey.

The return to the war as a time of trauma and uncertainty, often meaningless suffering,

undermines the ideological structures that make the war a tragic narrative, an act of

fatalistic sacrifice. The narrator’s dislocation, beyond society’s “grid”, has no dissenting

or political voice but rather wanders in memory, an alien reality whose existence seems

throughout the text to be almost ghostly, sharing none of the reference points of those

around it. The protagonist’s own existence and memory is a living contradiction of the

triumphalist post-war narrative.

Beneath this tragic mode there also exists the other major influence on Figes’

writing identified in her memoirs; the lingering effect of the holocaust upon her

identity. In terms of “holocaust writing” - dealing explicitly with the subject and/or

written by those whose first-hand experience of camps labels them “survivors” - Figes

can only be considered a peripheral figure. In fact, her most confident attempt to
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construct the holocaust is notably made in Journey to Nowhere as an exercise in

disputing the propaganda of Israeli apartheid; an argument based on her variform

Jewish experience and identity that denies the existence of a single Jewish state in

terms of both nationhood and as a way of being. The experiences of a young girl,

evacuated in 1939, whose father escaped the camps, is set out in Little Eden, but raises

the same questions about legitimacy that are seen in the “post-war” generation. Which

experience is “first-hand” enough to constitute a “survivor”? Legitimacy of victimhood

appears on a sliding scale of suffering that, for those on the comparably-less-bad end

of the spectrum implies a huge weight of guilt. Harry Corgas, in writing of how the

holocaust is dealt with in fiction, suggests that certain similar difficulties are often

addressed “with understatement, to write in what some critics have identified as a

literature of silence” (534). Figes’ subtle tone, ambiguous hints and melancholic prose-

poetry all lend themselves to this description. The definite presence of a Jewish

identity, or more rightly a survivor’s identity, with its attendant compulsive guilt and

ambiguous relationship to the beauty of life presents another element of Figes’ unique

style.

Zoe Waxman’s book Writing the Holocaust traces the development of

“holocaust writing” from its presence in the camps through to modern contributions

and revisions. Arguing that the “survivor’s individual experiences have become part of

a collective memory” (89), she nevertheless makes clear that this memory develops

over time. The initial post-war feeling shared by many was “a moral duty to testify, but

also the need somehow to account for their survival” (88). It is a sensation born of a

need to clarify the experiences suffered, yet also one that carries a burden of guilt. This

attitude is interestingly reflected in Figes’ first novel, Equinox, in a distinctly gender-

politicised manner. The novel’s perspective is that of the housewife entangled in the
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bonds of domesticity and, as such, the husband character holds a central role that

could be described as antagonist. However, for all the personal details of the female

writer character that may imply autobiographical connections, it is the character of the

husband that is given the Jewish identity. The effect of this is to present a barrier of

male subjectivity that is at once confrontational – “You really despise me for being a

Jew, don’t you, deep down” (36), he says after an unsuccessful dinner party – and

simultaneously a point of contemplation: “she thought about Martin… his love hate for

the English way of life which had allowed him to grow up in security but condemned

his parents to death because their economic self-sufficiency could not be guaranteed”

(86). The testimony of the survivor is projected on to the oppressive role of

domineering husband; the need to account for survival is therefore positioned as part

of a privileged male subjectivity that, by its nature, is unopen to question by the female

in a patriarchal society. The power to justify history, to place experience into a

“collective memory” narrative, remains the prerogative of masculinity. In a narrative

sense, this places the protagonist of Equinox in a bind of double-illegitimacy wherein

her personal experience is considered a dereliction of her duties to the male victim of

war and the Jewish victim of the holocaust. Again the patriarchal bias of social

narrative entraps women with taboo forces.

Yet to assume the “collective memory” has always been so is to misunderstand

the nature of the holocaust as an historical event. In terms of its construction through

the gradual accumulation of historical documents, the period in which Figes writes

these early novels is especially important. Waxman describes the “watershed for

acknowledging the suffering of… holocaust survivors” (113) as occurring in the trial of

Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. The very word “holocaust” as a means of

describing Nazi atrocities, one that specifically emphasises “the murder of European
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Jewry during World War Two” (88) as a distinct element of the mass destruction in

Europe at that time, did not become popularised in English “until sometime between

1957 and 1959” (88) according to Waxman. On the back of this interest and the

Eichmann trial, Raul Hilberg published The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961

which, at the time, “had to be sponsored by the Frank and Janina Petschek

Foundation” (as is emphasised by Figes in Journey to Nowhere, who writes, “I know,

because I was one of the original purchasers” (141)). Indeed, for Figes, this fact is

symptomatic of how “in 1945 the massacre of six million Jews was not considered the

most important aspect of the war” (141). The aspects of Konek Landing that feature

the Jewish refugee hiding in cupboards “months on end years maybe” (16) or starving

as work for him is “not legal, and [he is] lacking the necessary contacts” (95) all carry

deep resonances for the reader familiar with holocaust iconography – yet it would be

questionable to assume this specific level of awareness in the readership of its 1969

publication.

In treating Figes as a political writer making use of a technique of historical

revisionism we can be seen to be placing her within a distinct contemporaneous

trajectory. For Nelly Sachs, winner of the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Sixties

presented a moment that she looked back to in 1993 as a kind of starting point:

“subjects that were, before the 1960s, déclassé – women’s, blacks’, and Hispanics’

rights, Third World cultures, the Holocaust – now contend for overdue consideration”

(Klein, xv). The coming to prominence of identity politics created a moment wherein

submerged narratives could aspire to enter the hegemonic mainstream. The strength

of this idea is such that when Waxman writes of the first post-war Holocaust memoirs

in the forties she writes against “the idea of an all-pervasive post-war silence” (100)

that she still sees as dominant in Holocaust studies in 2006, in spite of the large
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number of Yiddish-language memoirs published. The notion of a continent going

through “difficult times of mourning and reconstruction, [not wanting to] return in

memory to the painful years” (375) as Primo Levi describes it, comes to validate the

return to the Holocaust in the Sixties. In terms of counter-narratives, Figes is placed as

much in a “holocaust writing” setting as a feminist setting when she engages with

these subjects; the emphasis being placed largely as part of a historical return, and a

generational claim to a new politics.

Again we can return to Figes’ conception of society as drawn through the

anthropological and narratological studies, Tragedy and Social Evolution and

Patriarchal Attitudes. For Figes, “the finger of blame may be pointed with rationality,

but if no obvious scapegoat or explanation can be found… societies are quick enough

to find an irrational scapegoat… Jews, blacks or communists” (Tragedy and Social

Evolution, 12). Enlightenment notions of a civilised society moving beyond superstition

through reason fall apart in Figes’ writings in the moment of their expression; revealed

as, more often than not, superficial apologies for oppressive systems of coercion.

Whether she is writing the old, the sick, the Jew or the woman , her characters emit a

dual being as both individual and historically constituted subject. As a tragic form, this

can lead her novels into strange poetries of despair such as the end of Konek Landing

which, in pursuing the totality of “a different grid”, steps out of recognisable reality and

into a symbolic dreamscape, an omniscience of thoughts. The holocaust survivor

aspect of the Konek character, only rarely alluded to in the novel, is universalised. Born

from the dawn of life at the start of the narrative, in the end he is carried away and

potentially sacrificed in a tribal ritual, himself labelled misra – “the word a talisman”

(153) constantly repeated – becoming “a willing sacrifice” (158) to be offered to

unknown gods. The image is one that emphasises the scapegoat nature of his character
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directly, although in an unexpected way it validates it. The power of the tragic figure is

fundamentally rooted in the unavoidable nature of their fate. It is a conclusion that

points to collective responsibility and collective guilt; a writing of victimhood within

which the central concern is not what happens to the victim, but rather what such a

ritual says about the society that perpetrates it. In many ways it is this quintessentially

ambiguous, animistic, and haunted vision which represents the capacity for Figes’

writing to be simultaneously epiphaneous in its aesthetics, politically potent, and

experimentally innovative at the same moment.

3.4: Journalism and Politics

As has been mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, Eva Figes could not survive as

a single mother purely upon the income from her literature and occasional Arts Council

grants. One of the forms that her other work took was journalistic writing: mostly

reviews and commissioned editorial pieces. As commercial writing, these pieces can be

used as a means of plotting Figes’ more personal and creative literary trajectory against

an industry “mainstream”. Her essays mark the points at which professional editors felt

her writing would be in demand by their publications’ audience. Having seen how

Figes’ work resonates between the two aspects of everyday ritual and deep social

structure, we can now use her journalistic output to connect her writing to the third

aspect of the historical moment. Most specifically, between the years of 1967 and

1973, Figes’ journalistic writing simultaneously reflects her philosophical concerns and

the trajectory of national current events already outlined in the introduction.

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 Prior to 1968, the majority of Figes’ writing to appear in periodicals came in the

form of reviews - a practice that she continues throughout, contributing to high-brow

culture magazine The Listener on a fairly regular basis. One notable review in The

Guardian at the end of 1967 demonstrates the state of British culture’s attitudes to

feminism,

There is something faintly comic about militant feminism now, which is

unfortunate, considering that the social injustice was real enough. One detects
the snigger in David Mitchell’s book though it is a serious study of the
Pankhursts and he obviously likes and admires them too.

That a historical study of the Pankhursts elicits a condescending humour may be a

comment upon the author’s style, yet its ideological premises are nevertheless echoed

by Figes herself as she defends the fact that “the social injustice was real enough”. The

past tense framing of social injustice is in keeping with the scientific progressivism of

Sixties sentiment; one cannot imagine that an advanced technological society harbours

social injustice, which is something surely limited to the less enlightened past. The

work of connecting the political present to women’s long historical oppression remains

in its latency.

As the consumerism of mid-Sixties Swinging London moves into the counter-

cultural politics of 1968, however, Figes’ engagement with contemporaneous injustice

begins to receive a platform in the form of an increased number of editorial pieces.

One of these, published in The Daily Telegraph Magazine under the title “Opinion”,

takes the bold stance of reassessing the cold war from a woman’s perspective,

suggesting that “when one looks at the status of women in Russia today it makes one

wonder whether total revolution is not the only way to bring about real changes for the

female sex”. A similar stance is taken on “The Generational War” in The Guardian,

where Figes argues that the contemporary political issue of youth rebellion falls along

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the same fault-lines as the “conflict… between the sexes”; “we try to be fair in a

situation that is basically unfair and unequal”. The central message underlying her

writing is similarly evoked in her defence of the Dagenham Ford plant strike for equal

pay; women who were acting towards a radical improvement in their own conditions

“would be doing a favour not only to themselves, but to the whole country” (“The Half-

Hearted Revolution”). Figes’ 1968 pieces draw together a whole range of social

concerns as a means of highlighting women’s position within society. Prior to the

discourse made available in the “Second Wave” of 1970, such a project is vocalised in

the language of post-war consensus. Women’s interests are promoted as part of a

democratic socialist project of improvement for all through social welfare structures.

Returning to Figes’ novelistic output it can be seen how these patterns of

political thinking tie in to her larger projects of formal innovation. Equinox, her first

novel published in 1966, uses the diary form as means of connecting the daily struggles

of a housewife with the deep anthropological structures that a calendar and its

seasonal rhythms imply. The feminist contestation of this state of affairs can only be

expressed through the evocation of the protagonist’s existence. Figes experimental

approach could be seen as an attempt to formally reflect Betty Friedan’s notion of “The

Problem that Has No Name”. In Figes’ next two novels, the problem of women’s

dissatisfaction in the midst of prosperity is then sublimated into the wider issues of the

post-war era. 1967’s Winter Journey is written from the perspective of a male war

veteran dying in poverty and 1969’s Konek Landing develops similar themes in

depicting the desolation of post-war Europe and the spectre of the holocaust. As has

been seen, Figes uses these narratives to raise questions about the ideological framing

of trauma in collective memory. When these questions are considered alongside her

journalistic work in which she presented women’s perspectives on contemporary

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issues, one can almost consider Patriarchal Attitudes as a fusion of the two

approaches. Published in 1970, the work amalgamates an eye for contemporary

politics, an anthropological appreciation for deep structures of history and perceptual

clarity in the presentation of “woman” as a historical subject.

The success of Patriarchal Attitudes demonstrably benefits Figes’ career in

essay writing, the number of specially commissioned pieces she is offered appears to

double in the first years of the 1970s. Pieces were written for The Guardian, The

Observer Magazine, Vogue, Man and Woman, Nova, Forum, The Evening Standard,

Good Housekeeping and The Listener. The correspondences which accompany the

commissions simultaneously demonstrate how alien feminist ideas appeared in

contrast with the usual topics of women’s magazine publishing as well as indicating the

popularity of women’s movements by the fact that “traditional” journals were

suddenly rushing to publish feminist pieces. Faye Ainscow of Forum wrote to Figes on

1st January 1971 expressing her appreciation of Patriarchal Attitudes and asking for a

contribution to their “series on marriage in the seventies”. Jill Wilkins, editor of the

Health and Beauty Encyclopaedia, requested an article about “The Plain Sister” which

she then asked to have corrected on 18th May 1970, complaining that “it seems to be

more concerned with the dilemmas of any young girl exposed to beauty-care

propaganda. This is not really relevant”. A 1971 article for Good Housekeeping, “What

are Women Fighting For?”, was run with only one correction: the rewriting of the

“provocative” title “The Sexist Society”.

The explosion of the women’s movement in the first years of the 1970s was

widely acknowledged outside of traditionally women-orientated publications. On 30 th

June 1970, J.E. Davis wrote to Eva Figes requesting a “special report” on “women in

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society” for the Britannica Book of the Year, stating that, “Obviously, the proliferation

of new feminist movements during the last year or two, particularly in the United

States but also in Europe, has had a bearing on our selection of this topic”. The final

piece, which Figes wrote “on the assumption that the readership would probably be

worldwide” (28th July 1970), reads like a highly compact version of Patriarchal Attitudes

in its simultaneously contemporary and deeply historical perspective. After introducing

the topic of discrimination against women through its “most serious” modern

manifestation, the pay gap, Figes goes on to present her fullest explication of the war’s

impact on women’s situation both during the conflict and in her contemporary

moment;

The generation of educated women who grew up at the end of the Second
World War were restrained from militancy, not only because they formed a
much smaller minority, but because at the time it was fashionable to emphasise
the importance of continuous personal contact between a mother and her
young children. A reaction to wartime conditions also helped to enhance the
attractions of family life. But attitudes to family bonds have changed
considerably since then, and the people most responsible for changing them
are the young adults who were brought up as Spock babies by that generation.
So the ranks of angry young women are swelled by the middle-aged, now
redundant mothers who have come to feel that too large a personal sacrifice
was demanded of them for those short years of active motherhood, and that
they have been cheated of any hope of realising other ambitions in their middle
age (10).

In addressing both mothers and daughters, Figes is not only bridging the much talked-

about “generation gap” popularised in late Sixties discourse but also identifying the

breadth of impact which the flourishing women’s movement was having. The 1978

introduction to Patriarchal Attitudes also makes a point of this unity of purpose,

describing how “women’s workshops sprang up all over the country; almost every

college had its feminist group, and women’s associations of long standing and of all

kinds suddenly joined in the growing chorus” (8). The accusation of Nigel Fountain in

Underground, that – along with Germaine Greer – Figes “remained resolutely detached

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from the upsurge” (107), finds its fatal flaw in this respect. Where Fountain focuses

upon the new feminist periodicals emerging from the counter-culture like Shrew, Red

Rag and Spare Rib, he fails to recognise the less dramatic yet equally important shifts

occurring in mainstream women’s journals. In terms of this phenomenon, Eva Figes is

at the crest of the wave.

As with other writers in this study, there is a shift in Figes’ output around the

end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973 which coincides with the break in national

political opinion away from the post-war consensus. Although Figes maintains a deep

interest in feminism and continues to write pieces furthering the cause of the women’s

movement, her work writing for New Humanist marks a return to current affairs

commentary but now with an increasing irony, cynicism and detachment. A piece on

“The Troubles with State Monopoly” in December 1972 contains a protracted attack

upon the national gas supplier after her conversion to gas was “almost enough to

convert me to private enterprise into the bargain… After all, who are ‘the people’ if not

consumers?”. This was followed by a piece in February 1973 entitled “Accustomed as I

am to Public Speaking” announcing her desire to retire from writing political editorials

to return to literary subjects, suggesting that “A writers’ true commitment is through

his craft, in the realm of ideas… There are plenty of propagandists anyhow: what we

need to be is seekers after truth”. It is some point around 1973 (the British Library

manuscript copy only tells the year) that Figes then writes her essay “The New

Humanism” in a half-sarcastic, half-nostalgic tribute to when “the first post-war

election heralded the dawn of a new age”, almost unimaginable from the piece’s

historical perspective at “the tail-end of the Industrial Miracle”. A new image of the

war’s legacy is presented,

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 The Welfare State would protect everyone from the cradle to the grave. Though
sweets were still rationed our senior citizens would soon enjoy free spectacles,
pills and teeth. With this false dawn of the age of the Common Man came all
sorts of new technological marvels. After the war it was suddenly revealed to a
deluded public that it was not Cockney courage and Winston Churchill’s cigar
which had won the Battle of Britain but a secret device called radar. This
modern marvel was to be followed by such peacetime delights as nylon
stockings, television, man-made fibres, plastics in every shape and colour, and
transistor radios. A plethora of goodies.

Figes’ satirical intention in “The New Humanism” seems to oscillate unpredictably; at

one moment the article is attacking the superficial concerns of consumers during the

boom years, the next it is lamenting the passing of those years as a time of hope and

plenty. The final result comes across as bitter and misanthropic – a piece more suitable

for The Spectator than New Humanist – yet in being so written it also communicates

frustration. After all, even when describing millennia of ingrained patriarchal

hegemony in her polemical writing Figes would retain her restrained writing style. The

frustration at the “end of an era” doesn’t appear to make its way into Figes’ writing the

way it does with other British experimental novelists in the Sixties, yet in her

journalistic writing it is certainly palpable.

Conclusion

Not only does Eva Figes present us with unique and original experimental novels, her

broad range of work – memoir, journalism, political essays and academic studies –

offers us insight into a number of practices normally considered distinct. Figes’

journalistic output, tied to a particular moment in the history of British feminism, is

noticeably informed by her wider academic practice which, in turn, can be seen to both

inform and be informed by her creative work. Political and emotional undercurrents

which shape the post-war era are everywhere subtly present in networks of influence

and confluence; the spectres of history channelled into dynamic currents and

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reactionary blockages alike. Figes’ practice demonstrates how the experimental search

for “a different grid” is not simply a matter of niche aesthetic concern, but is tied to the

revolutionary cultural moment of the Sixties at all levels.

Chapter 4: “A Committee Plans Unpleasant Experiments”: The Cut-up Culture of Alan

Burns

4.1: Critical Understanding of Alan Burns

If we are to consider the British experimental novelists of the Sixties as something

approximating a “movement” in a conscious sense, then the character who would

perhaps be at the head of such a movement would be Alan Burns. John Calder, in

describing the group of writers most closely associated with his avant garde literary

press – among them Eva Figes, B.S. Johnson, and Ann Quin – considered Burns to play

exactly this role (Pursuit, 277). Similarly, Jonathan Coe describes how Burns was “the

one British writer of whose intellect, seriousness and literary and political commitment

B.S. Johnson remained permanently in awe” (407). A barrister-turned-novelist, Burns’

approach to experimental writing is far more theoretically driven than many of his

contemporaries, although it also contains a hard political core which, as with the other

writers studied here, inextricably links formal innovation with the desire for social

change.

Although a handful of academics have approached Burns’ writing in the past –

most notably the contributors to the Alan Burns issue of The Review of Contemporary

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Fiction (No. 17 (2)) – his name is also used by certain academics as a stand-in for all

that they dislike about the general idea of “experimental” fiction. Andrzej Gasiorek, in

Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After, uses Burns as a straw man figure

synonymous with the “experimental” writing he sees as “increasingly rarefied versions

of the earlier shock tactics… the fag-end of a dying tradition” (19). Making passing

reference to Burns’ works as “Dada-inspired collages”, Gasiorek sets him against those

who “preferred to fuse technical innovations with strong social concerns” (180).

Notably, the novelists that draw Gasiorek’s praise are principally “concerned” with

storytelling and sympathy; the making palpable of other’s lives by fitting them into the

safe bourgeois novel form. John Orr, in Tragic Realism and Modern Society, makes a

similar case for the Political Novel as something that “directly confronts the hero with

the performed experience of others, who exist in their own right as individual beings”

(42); a trend that “experimental” novels move away from in their “evasion of social

relationships” (42). For the traditionalist, the “Political Novel” concerns communication

between self-sufficient individuals for the perusal of the rational and objective reader.

These are the exact presumptions which Alan Burns’ political project is intended to

upset. In fact, by failing to recognise Burns as a political writer critics have failed to

grasp not only the relevance of his work but also the valuable contribution to twentieth

century British writing that the Sixties experimental novel represents overall.

When writing of Alan Burns in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Charles

Sugnet describes his creative writing lessons at the University of Minnesota where

Burns taught “the craft of the old conventions so effectively that some of [the other

students] were surprised to discover he is an ‘experimental novelist’ (to use the

standard marginalising term of that period)” (194). This revelation brought with it a

simultaneous awareness of the politics embedded in his experimental style: “always…

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uncompromisingly political and uncompromisingly avant-garde at the same time: the

work demonstrates at the sentence level Burns’ conviction that these two positions are

inseparable” (193). Indeed, for Burns the act of writing differently is inherently linked

to the act of thinking differently and so the radical construction of text becomes a

political act in itself. “Early in writing I was naïve enough to think I could change the

world, a little,” Burns says in a 1981 interview for The Imagination on Trial, “or even

quite a lot” (167). These are certainly not the words of someone solipsistically seeing

out the “fag-end of a dying tradition”, but rather suggest a writer grasping their

historical moment with the Marxist dictum that writing about the world should not be

an end in itself, but a means to changing it.

However, for the same reasons that inspired Burns to write, we must first look

to certain aspects of Burns’ context before we assess his works as individual pieces. As

a manipulator of physical text, Burns’ style of practice is one of unique importance to

the literary radicals of his moment. The central figurehead in popularising this practice

was William S. Burroughs whose work with Brion Gysin on “cut-ups” and “fold-ins” so

captured the cultural imagination that when Burns adopts similar techniques in 1965’s

Europe After the Rain he struggles under the accusation of plagiarism - in spite of not

reading Burroughs himself until a number of years later (Madden: 1997, 125). With

variations on the method appearing not only in literature but art, music, film, and even

political pamphleteering and underground journalism such as Oz, there was similarly a

glut of contemporary (non-academic) theorising that arose to explain the relevance of

the method. It is this theorising of the “cut-up”, and its interrelations with

contemporary theories of social programming arising at the same time in the New Left,

that will provide us with a background from which to approach his own contribution to

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the phenomenon of the experimental novel of the Sixties and the political intention

which lay behind his personal idiosyncratic approach.

4.2: Burroughs, Burns and the Physical Manipulation of Text

Introducing The Imagination on Trial, a collection of interviews co-edited with Alan

Burns and published in 1981 (although the earliest included interviews, those with Eva

Figes and BS Johnson, date from 1973), Charles Sugnet talks of the huge influence

Burroughs had upon the writers both in the volume and upon the British literary scene

in general. He writes about discovering him at Cambridge and feeling that “however

out of place Burroughs may seem in such an artificial paradise, he found a place in the

rest of Britain” (2). Indeed, for the working class Britain of the decaying industrial

North, or the cramped urban sprawl of London, “Burroughs fits right into your native

landscape”; his writing is doing what many contemporary British writers are

attempting, which is accurately to express the “surreality of urban existence under late

capitalism” (2). There is a sense in which Burroughs’ novels represent not only

breakthrough texts in themselves but also a licence to construct novels in such a

fashion, to express the things no-one in Britain had yet had the courage (or the

success) to properly express by themselves. Talking of a similar moment of “discovering

Burroughs” in 1965, Ian Breakwell makes the comparison with visual artists who, when

they used words, “naturally took fragmentation and non-linear narrative for granted.

William Burroughs instantly made sense to me: it was a collage using words instead of

visual images” (184). Outside the visual arts – those that Brion Gysin, Burrough’s

collaborator, famously said were thirty five years ahead of literature – the response

was not so positive: “the literary critics claimed he was unreadable,” Breakwell writes.

Like Sugnet, however, Breakwell does identify certain contemporary writers upon

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whom he considered the Burroughs influence to be felt; amongst them, “J.G. Ballard,

Joe Orton, Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson and Alan Burns” (184).

The critical moment of Burroughs’ elevation to “influence” status in the British

literary scene is said in Ted Morgan’s exhaustive biography, Literary Outlaw, to come

with John Calder’s decision in 1962 to book out Edinburgh University’s 3000 seat

McEwan hall and add a huge literary conference to the proceedings of the already

sizeable Edinburgh festival. Burroughs’ description of the cut-up technique, reinforced

by the furore surrounding the Naked Lunch obscenity trial, became one of the central

debating topics discussed on the day with writers as disparate as Normal Mailer, Mary

McCarthy, Alexander Trocchi and Henry Miller lining up to express their enthusiasm

whilst an equally loud voice of disapproval was heard from Malcolm Muggeridge,

Stephen Spender, Rayner Heppenstall and Colin MacInnes. As a result, Burroughs’ cut-

up method was thoroughly described in periodicals such as The Scotsman, The Times

and Books and Bookmen; not always with enthusiasm but certainly with an eye for a

good story (Morgan, 341). John Calder, whose reputation as a showman was only

equalled by his respect for authors’ editorial choices, commissioned Burroughs to

compile Dead Fingers Talk in early 1963. “To avoid the kind of books of selections I find

so dreary,” Burroughs said in a later interview, “I have arranged [sections from Naked

Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded] in the form of another novel

with some additional linking material” (“Burroughs after Lunch”, 52). This cut-up of two

earlier cut-ups and his own novel “received a long hostile review in the Times Literary

Supplement – it was headlined ‘Ugh’ – sparking off a fourteen-week correspondence

often running up to four pages per issue” (Lotringer, 54), and effectively placing

Burroughs and his techniques back at the centre of literary debates yet again.

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 The sudden rise to prominence and eventual ubiquity of Burroughs within the

British literary scene of the Sixties can perhaps be attributed to his work’s placement at

the heart of many divisive debates and fissures present within British culture at the

time. His Beat credentials place him at the heart of a counter-culture struggling against

the restraints of tradition – or its British equivalent “the Establishment” – but also

internally divided around questions of American cultural hegemony. The cut-up

technique upsets traditional conceptions of the author as imaginative creator

borrowing, as it does, older works and reappropriating them. Similarly, Burrough’s

work appears to chime with the questions of consciousness and control which were

central to the various political movements known as the “New Left”. A central text,

Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, evokes a proto-Burroughsian feel at a number of

points. “Control” occurs, according to Marcuse, when “propositions assume the form

of suggestive commands” – dead metaphors like “lifestyle”, “entertainment industry”,

“war games”, “friendly-fire”, promote positive thinking and dissuade critical thinking –

and, as a result, modern society is pacified by “Publicitiy Agents [who] shape the

universe of communication” (85). It is within this tradition that much of Alan Burns’

experimental approach can be situated. As will be seen from the following study,

however, Burns seldom vocalises his own intentions, often presenting his arguments in

a suggestive rather than didactic fashion. As a result, Burroughs’ willingness to

elaborate at length about his approach may serve as a useful introduction to how

physical manipulation of text was being theorised during the Sixties, even if Burns’ own

approach has a number of notable differences.

Nathan Moore, writing about Burroughs’ conception of “Nova Law” and the

“logic of control”, takes the novelist’s recurring term - “control” - to mean “a set of

problems concerned with the functioning of language or, more explicitly, with the
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relations between word and image” (435). It is this set of language/image connections

that Burroughs imagines as the ideological structures dictating human organisation and

social coercion. The ties between language structures and power structures are not

only acting closely, towards a common interest, but are actively one and the same. In

Burroughs’ more lucid moments of explanation, such as the introduction to his

collaboration with Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (the first book-length attempt to explain

and demonstrate the cut-up technique as a revolutionary force), he explains “control”

in historical terms as an imperialist literary engine of the emergent bourgeoisie:

In composing verbal chains subject to extremely strict rules that provided not
only sophisticated entertainment suitable to an evening of leisure but above all
the expression of the political and aesthetic formalism of an empire that had
invented its very religion, the coauthors of these linked poems established the
organic and ideological connections on which their privileges were founded
(10).

The aesthetic correlation between strict form and metre with content that praises

order, honour, bravery, and other military virtues lends these poems an internal,

“organic” consistency. Once “linked” together into a network of established literary

practice and taste such values hold the monopoly on judgement. A statement against

the established order, against their privileges, is then no longer simply “disagreement”,

but is rather “morally wrong” and “unnatural”. There is also within this concept an

echo of the linguistic term “control”; for example, the subject control verb that

implicates the agency of the doer within the action.19 Burroughs is therefore thinking

power relations as immanent forces within everyday life; a reformulation of power

most often credited to his poststructuralist contemporaries in terms of theory but, for

Burroughs, began with his study of Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics at university

(Morgan, 72).

19
An example of the subject control verb would be “John refuses to work”, rather than “John is not
working”.

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 Against this concept of power as internalised “control”, Burroughs poses his cut-

up method as the ultimate site of resistance. Cut-ups become “exercises to expand

consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words”

(Burroughs and Gysin, 2). Cutting between images, phrases, textual blocks, creates new

network connections just as immanent as “control” but no longer operating within

their established associations; dominant values, logics, and ideologies. For Burroughs

and Gysin, this is simply making “explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all

the time anyway” ; the person reading a newspaper in “the proper Aristotelian manner,

one idea and sentence at a time” is also, unconsciously, “reading the columns on either

side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up” (4-5). Certainly later

scientific studies of reading, such as those drawn on by Glyn White in Reading the

Graphic Surface, have proven that “when reading, we are perceiving the whole page, as

well as the linear, left to right, continuation of the text. [Although] ordinarily the

specific differences between one page of prose and the next go unnoticed” (9). The

“making explicit” of the cut-up technique is intended to force a re-evaluation of

reading processes within the subject and, in doing so, undermine the power structures

imposed upon them by “control” by weakening their monopoly on associations.

It is at this point that the revolutionary aspect of Burroughs’ ideas appears, and

with it a whole set of political associations which, described in interviews from the late

1960s and 1970s, often position Burroughs’ works as part of a distinct movement

against existent organisations. In a 1968 interview with Jeff Shiro entitled “Revolt!”, he

states that “the very fact that we have this communications system [means] it can be

decentralised at any point. The first thing for any revolutionary party to do would be to

seize the communications. Who owns communications now, controls the country” (97).

Arguably, such statements could be discounted as common to the radical posturing of

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many popular underground figures of the time. However, by 1974 Burroughs is still

making similar statements. An interview with Pierre Dommergues, entitled “Recipes for

a Liberation”, focuses on the definite need to advance ideologically if revolution is to be

possible: “the Inquisition and the power of the church in the Middle Ages weren’t

overturned by direct revolutionary action. Their control disappeared because human

consciousness went further” (243). Rather than discarding revolutionary change as

futile or embracing a certain fatalistic determinism on the back of this analysis,

Burroughs makes imperative the need for artistic commitment to liberation – “you

have to shatter the official lines of association” – and amongst the techniques that

make this possible, “I offer methods capable of having a subversive effect” (242).

Cutting-up becomes a form of creative destruction; a radical action in its own right. It is

this vision of communication as domination and the cut-up as praxis which represents

one of the foremost literary trends of the counter-cultural British Sixties. Exported from

America by Burroughs, the British nevertheless appropriated it for their own

experimental purposes.

The reach of cut-up culture is difficult to define, its popularity being such that

debts to Burroughs as an inspiration would often go unrecognised. Tom Philips, whose

“treated Victorian novel” A Humument first appeared in 1970, first mentions “the

related influence of William Burroughs and John Cage” (ix) in an added introduction in

2012. Jeff Nuttall, whose underground paper My Own Mag featured contributions from

Burroughs, made constant use of the cut-up technique. Visual quotation was also a

popular technique made use of by the underground press, Monty Python’s Terry

Gilliam, The Beatles (whose “Sgt. Pepper” album cover, made by pop artist Peter Blake,

features Burroughs amongst other cut-and-paste faces), and countless others. Joe

Orton, identified by Breakwell as a key British writer influenced by Burroughs, spent

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the summer of Burroughs’ 1962 rise in prison for “cutting-up”, altering and, from a legal

standpoint, vandalising the covers of public library books. Alexander Trocchi, also

connected to John Calder through his Better Books’ “environmental exhibitions” of

1965, established his “Project Sigma, the… intergalactic [telephone] switchboard of

information, a project for ‘invisible insurrection’” (Fountain, 23) in 1966 having worked

with Burroughs in Paris only a few years earlier. In experimental theatre, Charles

Marowitz produced a whole series of Shakespearean “cut-ups” - “A Macbeth, Hamlet,

An Othello, The Shrew, Measure for Measure and Variations on the Merchant of

Venice” (Schiele, 15) – all of which drew considerable attention and acclaim. One

person who considerably appreciated Marowitz’s work was Alan Burns, who would

produce Palach with him at the Open Space theatre in 1970.20

Burns’ play, originally titled “Remember Palach”, was – according to a publicity

letter from Marion Boyars – intended to “show the indifference of the world at large to

[Czech student Jan] Palach’s suicide, and although it is not the obvious sermon, it

would fall into the category of unstated propaganda”. Palach, who committed a public

act of self-immolation in protest at the end of the Prague Spring in 1969, is presented

as a nondescript everyman character, not particularly outspoken or possessed of

intense emotions, with the act itself merely implied. The intention is to recreate the

suffocating conditions of suburban mediocrity through many “strands of action”

(“Remember Palach”, 1) occurring simultaneously. Five forms of “Words” are read out,

overcutting each other, these being both invented (“Medieval disputation explores the

20
Another circuitous connection can be found between Burroughs and Burns from the year 1970.
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was the first book to be acquitted of an obscenity charge after the United States
liberalised its obscenity laws in 1966 (Morgan, 342-343). This precedent opened the door to a dramatic
rise in the amount of “hardcore” pornography published, leading to the establishment of the “United
States Commission on Obscenity and Pornography” whose reported findings, published in 1970, were
edited for a British audience by Alan Burns in his role as former barrister, appearing as 1972’s To Deprave
and Corrupt.

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mythical and historical aspects”, “Poetic evocation of the martyrdom, spoken as

dramatic monologue”), drawn from real statements (“Documents: Jan Palach’s last

letter… scientific treatise on self-burning”, “Dialogue… memories of Palach’s suicide as

witnessed event and news item”), and invented “Communist Party communiqués”. As

these “Words” are read, actors take part in simultaneous smaller scenes with titles like

“Lovers”, “Art”, “Knockabout”, “Money”, which pastiche daily life whilst providing

metacriticism of the play itself (a “financial analysis of the evening’s performance” (2),

for example). Further unpredictable aspects are then added in the form of playbacks of

interviews with the audience conducted prior to the show, randomly selected

recordings from Calder’s 1962 Edinburgh Writer’s Conference (no doubt featuring

Burroughs), and a planned fire alarm (although the note “Read Theatre Fire

Regulations”, suggests this may not have made the final performance for legal reasons).

The climax of the piece was a totality of noise which is used to simultaneously “evoke

the Noise of Prague, when, on 1st anniversary of the Soviet invasion, the population

expressed its independence by dominating the streets with a barrage of noise” (3) as

well as reflecting the intensity of self-immolation. One can imagine that the low budget

audio equipment available to an experimental theatre in 1970 would produce

tremendous feedback and distortion during this climax aurally replicating the crunching

sound of burning cut through with high-pitched screaming. That this noise is generated

through simultaneous voices would implicate society and its discourses in the resulting

act itself.

Due to its contingent nature, Palach is not particularly evocative in its scripted

form and its staging would have rendered any attempt at a faithful recording

impossible; the action was designed to surround the audience in a reversed “in-the-

round” setting, immersing them in the action. Jinnie Schiele’s Off-Centre Stages does
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contain some of the “Ionesco-like” pre-scripted conversations, however, including

those of Dad “[read newspaper]: Paper, paper, paper, paper, paper” and Mum

“[washes dishes]: Dishes, dishes, dishes, dishes, dishes” (51), as well as conversations

constructed out of advertising slogans. The techniques that bind such a production to

the Burroughsian method can be seen in this aspect of redundancy and “found

materials”, as well as the element of tape recording.21 Importantly though, Palach also

contains the elements which differentiate Alan Burns’ experimental method from

Burroughs’ cut-ups and other Sixties aleatory practices in general. At the heart of this

practice is the desire to liberate new, more authentic modes of presentation from the

anarchistic fragmentation of the old. In the act of shattering the lines of “control” as

defined by Burroughs, Marcuse, et al, Burns is seeking to liberate latent energies which

established structures have seemingly curtailed and stratified.

The fullest account that Alan Burns provides of his overall experimental

approach is the unfinished work Accident in Art, an “Outline” of which is held in the

Calder Archive in Indiana. Perhaps fittingly, the thirty-six pages of notes comprising the

“Outline” are almost entirely made up of quotations. To grasp Burns’ thinking, one has

to intuit the use to which each of these quotations might be put. A quote from

Burroughs, for example, is a short comment comparing words to “animals” that “know

better where they belong than you do” (10). Rather than the cut-up technique itself,

we can see that Burns is drawn to the implication of an authentic order, a “truer”

grammar. One of the only sections not made up of quotations in Accident in Art

concerns Marlon Brando;

His acting has the poetry of free association, in that state of mind between
sleeping and waking, at the same time clear and confused… he moves at the
21
Burns goes on to use tape recording as the primary means of compiling material for The Angry Brigade
(1973). The use of “transcription” is also seen in Ann Quin’s Three, another Calder-published novel.

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 pace of the semi-somnambulist. And, as it is said that sleepwalkers instinctively
avoid bumping into furniture or falling out of windows, so Brando never comes
to grief. The intellect is dulled but ‘something else takes control’ – some
uncomplicated emotional response linked to pre-natal memory, infantile and
innocent [thus he] uncovers many beauties and insights that were never
expressed in the medium before. (11)

It is in the context of this “semi-somnambulist” vitality that the works of Alan Burns

must be comprehended. The physical manipulation of text is not simply a postmodern

technique for demonstrating the pliability of text and for playing with ideas of the

authorial originality, it is rather a view which has a real (not Implied) reader in mind.

Burns himself is creating works which enter the world as physical books, but these

books are themselves objects which each reader has to encounter and, in so doing, will

be forced to make use of the “pre-natal”, more authentic aspects of their

consciousness in order to negotiate irrational associations of words and images. For

Burns this activity is inherently political, as described at the end of Accident in Art

when quoting from Kurt Schwitters; “the act of putting together two or three innocent

objects, such as a railway ticket, a flower, and a bit of wood” may seem to be “an

innocent aesthetic affair” (35), yet it is actually stripping these objects of their

connection to their owners, “railway companies… gardeners… timber merchants” (36)

and “making havoc of the classification system on which the regime is established” (36)

in favour of organic networks generated by each individual for themselves. Burns’ “cut-

ups” are essentially bound to a new literature which is, in turn, inherently connected to

a new society.

4.3: The Experimental Novels of Alan Burns 1961-1973

At a mere seventy-seven pages, it is questionable as to whether Alan Burns’ first

published novel, Buster, is really a novel at all. Lacking the narrative concision

associated with the novella form, it is perhaps more suitable to describe Buster as a

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bildungsroman constructed out of a series of chronologically linear but stylistically

diverse scenes. It features many aspects of what would come to be a recognisable

“Burns style” but, as could be expected for a first novel, it retains many of the

“traditional” narrative devices – coherent characters, expositionary description – that

would later disappear. Its first (and currently only) appearance was in the first of Calder

Books’ “New Writers” series in 1961. Calder described the “New Writers” project in

1997 thus: “Each volume tried to combine different kinds of literature, experimental or

not, occasional poetry, short stories, work in progress of extracts from works are liked,

but not enough to publish as a book or on its own” (180). New Writers 1 featured The

Scala Scare by Dino Buzzati, a long short story from an established Italian writer

translated by Cynthia Jolly, and The Catfish by Monique Lange, described as the

“newest star in the French literary firmament” whose story, translated by Barbara

Wright, appears as a kind of advertisement for her forthcoming British full-length novel

debut – The Plane Trees. Sandwiched between the two is Alan Burns’ Buster, “a young

man’s disillusioning view of the post-war world”, the promise of which on the jacket

cover lies in its writing being “on a high level”.

Following Dan Graveson, a protagonist whose life parallels the author’s in an

exaggerated manner, the narrative begins with a claustrophobic wartime childhood

before moving through the many failed career attempts of a character typical of the

“angry young man against the Establishment” type. The self-destructive quality of his

distrust for authority figures begins with an English Literature final exam question, “Dr.

Johnson was the Hero of the Age. Discuss.” to which he replies that “Johnson was God.

And typical of his age. Era of Goodsense worship, sameness the ultimate ideal, piggery

and prudery rife, nonsense wisdom, pomposity prestige” (79). Depicted as a “mountain

of conventional revulsion, foul-mannered filth loving big boar beast”, he describes a

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bust of Johnson as necessary to any household, as essential as the “great lumping

tasteless Victorian grandfather clock”, before leaving a considerable space upon the

page and ending with the non sequitur, “for I’m modern and fine young man” (79).

Although ostensibly an attack on middle class values – their expected conformities and

denial of bodily excesses – the language follows the haughty register of the eighteenth

century satirists and even includes a number of faux-eighteenth century portmanteaus

and onomatopoeias like “nightmareman”, “stumpgomping”, and “glumping”. In many

ways it recognises the poetic power of the satiric mode in the same moment that it

ridicules those praising it. As such, Dan can be seen to be simultaneously proving

himself equal to the established greats whilst making hypocrites of the markers who he

knows will fail him in spite of his adoption of their preferred style.22

Using authenticity in language as a means of revolt and a justification for

attacking those in power is a recurring theme throughout Dan’s subsequent failures

elsewhere. Having initially joined the army, he then joins the Communist Party and

paints “join the movement for peace!” (103) on the ammunition store before

describing the properties of weapons to his men by including their cost worked out in

terms of “council houses or hospital beds” (109). Out of the army, he attempts the bar

exam a number of times, failing each one by asking questions such as; “why in all

history a judge has never once said: ‘put a sock in it’?” (130). Each attempt at a career

involving intellectual labour is undermined by Dan’s destructive need to prove himself

more intelligent or more authentic than those in power and the novel ends with him

returning home to take up a manual job, much to the chagrin of his aspirational

22
Interestingly, Burns’ use of “found material” can be seen to originate here in the form of self-
plagiarism. According to an interview with Madden appearing the Review of Contemporary Fiction in
1997, “’Johnson in the Modern Eye’, the essay…, was originally written by me aged 16 and published in
the school magazine” (110). Framed by Burns’ fictionalising narrative, however, this well-received essay
is presented as having the opposite effect – getting the protagonist expelled.

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working class father. Politically, Buster can be seen as an audacious counterargument to

that other post-war novel of failure within a meritocratic system, Amis’ Lucky Jim;

where Jim fails by never quite living up to the demands of the Establishment, Dan fails

by making a point of his superiority. In this first novel, Burns’ vision of authority as

inherently contradictory (and for that reason petty and hypocritical) has already forced

his most fully formed character out of the narrative. The journey of Buster as a

bildungsroman comes full circle; the traditional novel form has successfully contained

Burns’ anger, so if he wants to write himself out of the vicious circle he’ll have to do

something about the novel form.

Traces appear throughout Buster of the experimental style which Burns will

later adopt consistently. Michael Dennis Browne, in describing his experiences with

Burns’ writing, explains its peculiarity as reminiscent “of writing a brilliant foreigner

might do, one discovering the expressive possibilities of the language by writing in it,

taking liberties of usage not knowing them to be liberties” (206). In Buster such an

approach to writing is celebrated by the protagonist himself, albeit the place of the

foreigner learning English being taken by an adolescent learning to type: “Dan typed on

the first sheet, a word: Onion. And then, brilliantly: Man. Onion Man. What a picture!

Was there another mind in the school that could have conceived it?” (77). Piecing

together words and phrases, seeking to make something new of them, seems

applicable to Dan as a character whose only true marker of success is himself. The

phrases come out unexpectedly, surprising the writer himself and therefore allowing

him the imaginary distance necessary to stand by the writing as good independent of

individual ego. Burns writes in Beyond the Words of a similar start being made in his

own writing when he wrote a poem about a horse galloping across a beach. “I’d seen

the horse and the beach separately and put them together,” he writes, “one verse
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described the horse like the sea ‘breaking across the beach’” (65). The art of the writer

in both of these cases is actually more in editing than creating. The writer selects words

or images and builds a collage from them that provokes interesting parallels and

disjunctions; the process is almost mechanical, denying a sense of “pure inspiration”

and creativity, he is not directing actors in a play but cutting together a movie from

scenes filmed far apart in space and time.

In his various descriptions of the inspirational moment behind Buster’s

conception, Burns emphasises the move from word to image in his imagination as both

the move from truth to fiction, and from poetry to prose. Suitably for the content of

the anecdote, it takes a number of forms in different publications and interviews. In

1981’s The Imagination on Trial he pinpoints the moment he spotted “a photograph of

a young couple kissing, embracing” (161) in a jeweller’s window that bore an uncanny

relation to his parents, who he was attempting at the time to write about. The

photograph represented the moment when “I realised I needn’t tackle their psychology

or their histories, I could start with a picture” (163). In the Imagination on Trial version

of the story “a day or two later I got out the family album and started looking at it”

(163) and built up Buster from there, although he does go on to deny that any other

novels began that way as they usually started “not with pictures but with words” (163).

In the 1975 Beyond the Words version of the story the photograph remains on its own,

as a singular problem of uncanny representation – both his parents and not his parents

– until he “solved the problem simply by describing the photograph, the image” (64).

Once “I described the couple in the photo as if they were my parents when they

weren’t really,” Burns became aware that he could similarly review his life in mental

images and describe them in sequence (without resorting to a photo album) and also

“at the same time discovered I could lie” (64). Perhaps retrospectively inspired by his
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close friend B.S. Johnson’s mantra that “telling stories is telling lies”, this particular

attitude to representation is nevertheless vital to understanding Burns as a novelist.

The core of authenticity within his works stems from their initial existence as true

images, the closest form of mimesis possible within the twentieth century, which, by

dint of their reality, can be manipulated and reappropriated by the creative writer with

the good conscience that their fictional world is rooted in some kind of baseline truth.

The unity of Burns’ aesthetic and political vision of creating a literature which

liberates humanity’s authentic consciousness is not yet formed in Buster, and it is the

traditional novel form which appears to restrain it the most. The dialogue and

exposition is direct in conveying the righteous anger of the protagonist before

becoming more fluid, elaborate and jarring during passages of description. These

linguistic flourishes, the products of transcribed images, are considered by Charles

Sugnet as characteristic of the Burns style; “technically what an American composition

teacher would chastise as a ‘run-on sentence’…with three main clauses and no

conjunction” (196). In a way the style is seeking an authentic and yet poetic description

of the image – a purely aesthetic result of innovative new writing methods – but in

another way it is seeking to bypass traditions of description, the established way of

seeing, and in doing so seeks to represent truth without the weight of expected

interpretations. Like his protagonist in Buster, Burns is playing the part of the lawyer

alienated by the language of litigation and officialdom, telling traditional blasé

description to “put a sock in it”. The effect, however, becomes itself alienating, most

especially as it appears where certain stock reactions are to be expected. The death of

Dan’s mother during a buzzbomb strike is dealt with in a singular, almost banal image,

contorted and expanded almost to obscenity:

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 A policeman wrote in his notebook: Scratch on left shoe approx. one inch. The
foot had a slight unnatural twist at the ankle. She could not have bent her foot
like that if she had been alive. The difference was small, an angle of ten
degrees. But alive she could not have done it without breaking the bone,
gouging one bone into the other, wrenching the muscle enough to make her
scream with pain or come to near as screaming as an ill middle-aged woman
can, not a young clean scream, but a choke, a sob, a cough, a constriction in the
throat cause by too much trying to escape at one time. Weight is being drawn
into the earth, pulled to the middle of it. Her foot weighed. (74)

After the image is introduced in the policeman’s note there follows three explanatory

sentences building from the image with increasing objective details. The next sentence,

starting with a “but” where the last sentence left off and “running-on”

unapologetically, seeks to contain within it the entirety of the emotional reaction

through a montage of associated images growing closer to the mother as a person the

further they move from the original image. By the end of the paragraph the image is

returned to in a state of pure objectivity, emptied of its associated images and dealt

with in non-human terms. “Her foot weighed,” an image of the corpse as pure matter,

seems to linger between emotional deadness and the pathos such objectivity draws

from the reader. Images and their associations are being manipulated here by Burns,

although it won’t be until his next novel, Europe After the Rain, that the full emotional

impact of image manipulation will be utilised in a consistent manner.

In spite of the blurb to New Writing 1 which promises that Alan Burns is “just

now completing” his second novel, Europe After the Rain in fact took another four

years to publish; appearing in 1965. Set in an ambiguous war-torn European setting,

the book revolves around an unnamed and seemingly aimless male protagonist and his

dealings with a woman and her father who at different times appear to fight for, and

occasionally lead, both the rebels/revolutionary army and a force described as both

“loyalist” and “occupying” the nation. Attempts to impose any internal logic upon the

situations described are fleeting and often contradictory as the action moves through

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the wartime landscape on the whims of dreamlike autosuggestion (or Brando-esque

somnambulance). David Madden, in his “Introduction to Alan Burns” that opens the

Burns edition of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, describes the novel like so:

Taking its title form a Max Ernst painting, the novel attempts to take fiction in
the direction of a surrealist painting. The narrative is enveloped in ambiguity –
the setting is vague though universal, the characters are unnamed, the motives
underlying behaviour are often opaque, and the temporal period could be
anytime (110).

In a sense, the novel can then be seen as typifying a certain avant garde style present

in a number of contemporary works; the desolate emotional post-war landscapes of

Eva Figes’ works appearing in novels like Konek Landing, Rayner Heppenstall’s post-war

ennui in The Connecting Door, or the nouveau roman’s emphasis on stasis practiced by

Robbe-Grillet. Unlike these works, Burns’ novel has a distinct preference for violence

and dread over futility and soul-searching, but the wandering quality of the work

remains. The choice of the Max Ernst painting’s title as one suitable to be “stolen”,

according to The Imagination on Trial, was part of Burns himself finding the work to be

“too diffuse and [needing] pulling together” (163). To what extent could this

wandering, lost quality – a narrative of ambiguous scenes or images – be considered a

product of Burns’ working methods can be judged through a number of later

interviews and essays.

The fullest account of Europe After the Rain’s construction appears in Beyond

the Words and centres around a period where “three accidents happened” (65): the

Max Ernst painting appeared at the Tate, in a second-hand bookshop he found “the

verbatim record of the Nuremburg trials”, and soon after there was published “a

journalist’s report on life in Poland after the war” that Burns dismissed as a “mere

travelogue” in its attempts to avoid real characterisation and analysis. The third book,

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however, “provided most of the background material,” not as a book to be read but to

be typed from “in a semi-trance…eyes glazed and in the blur only the sharpest and

strongest words, mainly nouns, emerged”. After writing down what he could gather in

this manner he then “made [his] own sense of them later”. Recalling these methods to

David Madden in an interview in 1994, Burns describes how the closest he got to the

“truth” of the Polish situation came through a cross-reading of these notes with the

Nuremberg transcripts; “I do not think I could have found it possible to read books on

Polish concentration camps”. Believing himself “not capable of journalistic accuracy,”

Burns focused on creating a “something a lot hazier, yet composed of razor sharp

details, splinters of fact”. Retrospectively, Burns’ account of his working methods

placed a large emphasis on his squeamishness, his desire to avoid reality at its most

brutal and horrifying, yet the particular emphasis placed upon the Nuremberg trial

transcripts would seem to suggest otherwise. As a barrister, Burns would be well aware

of the peculiar nature of courtroom formalities (those Dan held so much in contempt in

Buster) that present both sides with a chance to make their case, to be judged based

upon law and reason. The excision of atrocities from the source material that would be

capable of eliciting physical disgust, fear, and disbelief can be seen to protect the

“editing” mind of the writer from becoming overwhelmed. Rather than imagine the

thoughts of one capable of horrors, Burns places his own mind into a series of images

and reacts personally with a perhaps equally brutal numbness.

Commenting on Europe After the Rain as a book evoking a numbness of feeling,

Burns considered it a result of being “concerned with brutality and physical extremity

but not with pain” (Beyond the Words, 65). This is certainly true of perhaps the most

protracted scene of violence in the book, in which the female character is forced by her

father to sleep with the enemy commander in order to assassinate him, but is caught
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and whipped before the male protagonist. Notably, for the amount of conflicting

emotions such a scene would presumably evoke, very little is described in terms of

feelings; the sexual content is presented as combat – “he pursued her, she shielded

herself”, “his motionless power”, “she furiously hunted” (69) – whilst the violence is

presented surgically – “I could see the folded skin, the muscle dislocated, the normal

state interfered with…the stretched membrane remained, portions of the membrane

stretched in fine threads” (70). Pleasure and pain are reduced to aspects of physical

anatomy. In addition to this non-empathetic presentation of the image there is the

transference of perspective as characters are on the verge of feeling emotion. The

sexually excited commander is viewed by the agent seducing him until the moment

when she fails in her objective, at which point the description moves to the

commander’s perspective as he subdues her – yet, before he can take sadistic pleasure

in punishing her, the scene moves to the detached viewpoint of the male protagonist.

Like Burns himself avoiding contact with upsetting material, the narrative voice of

Europe After the Rain positions itself as a bystander unable to become involved,

witnessing from a distance. The reader is implicated in the inhumanity by viewing the

scene from such a perspective.

The aesthetic result of Europe After the Rain’s numbness is an overall

atmosphere of oppressive futility, a detachment from authentic “reality” and any

bonds of commitment such authenticity might demand. As Malcolm Bradbury

diagnosed “Character and Abstraction” in The Contemporary English Novel, we could

say that “modern cybernetic and scientific views… seem to have displaced the old

‘character’: figures are paste-ups or cut-outs, role-players or pastiche agents moving

through a world of disjunct relations” (185). The purposeful “precariousness and

ambiguity” that Burns describes as the central traits of the novel are indeed
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consciously constructed around such a worldview. In The Imagination on Trial, Burns

describes linearity as “unavoidable” due to the nature of novel reading, and as such he

seeks to make “more obscure those connections” between “what comes next” (164) in

the narrative. Again, in a 1997 published interview with Madden, he describes the role

of narrator within Europe After the Rain as part of this network of obscured

connections: “give him a job and the novel becomes reportage… the reader would

demand it,” “the narrator’s uncertain role and status is vital” (125). As part of creating

the effect of numbness Burns is utilising the techniques of disillusion of character and

environment similar to that of Burroughs in his cut-ups, or even Pynchon and the other

host of metafiction writers who, supposedly devoid of sentiment, Bradbury labels

“totalitarian”. There remains, however, in the lingering images from which the novel

was constructed, a haunting presence of the real that on occasion cancels out the

distancing effects. From the opening scene set on a bus when we are told that “two

passengers could not find their tickets. They were taken off to some sort of centre, or

so I was told” (7), there is a sense in which the alienation is “truer” in affect and moves

towards the confrontation of the reader with form; a technique that develops into his

next novels.

1967’s Celebrations represents the high watermark of Alan Burns’ experimental

fiction; his own personal favourite, but more importantly also the novel when his “cut-

up” techniques and detached style of unpacking images combine to create his most

cohesive attack upon traditional form and the bourgeois ideology it is seen to

indoctrinate. At this time, Burns was engaged upon “discovering for myself many of the

techniques Burroughs and Gysin describe” (Madden, “Interview”: 1997, 125) and using

them as “a political rejection of bourgeois art as a self-indulgence irrelevant to the

struggle for social justice, which…perpetuates a system based on exploitation and

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greed” (Beyond the Words, 64). A protracted description by Burns of his workspace in

The Imagination on Trial describes a Burroughsian cut-up editing studio at its most

excessive; “the high technology…consists of a pair of scissors, paste and…a large table

top so I can place things side by side… I can spend a day looking for a phrase… I start

from chaos and work towards order… I accumulate as large a mass of raw material as

possible and then try to order it” (163).23 It would be a number of years before cassette

recorders for speech, film cameras and visual collages would become involved –

around the time of Dreamerika! in 1972, but the “author as editor of reality” had by

1968 become Alan Burns’ definitive working methodology. The novel itself is described

in Beyond the Words as rising up from these cut-up practices almost of its own accord.

Burns consciously delayed “until the last minute any notion of what the book was

about” (66); rather, the piecemeal work fell organically into the categories of “heavy

public rituals: marriages, funerals, wakes” (66) and began to show “a strange

consistency in choice of characters. With no preconception or conscious decision I

repeated my family pattern” (65/66). The resulting novel is a long power struggle

between the son, Michael, and the father, Williams, over the factory where they work

that they come to own, the house where they live, and the affections of the other

brother, Philip, and later Philip’s widow, Jacqueline. Starting from a maelstrom of words

and images, Burns constructed a family saga; effectively tearing the bourgeois novel

apart and sticking it back together again in a radical process of reappropriation.

When considering the effect that this process of endless, semi-conscious

cutting-up had upon the text itself it is tempting to look first at the sentence structures

23
Charles Sugnet, in “Burn’s Aleatoric Celebrations: Smashing Hegemony at the Sentence Level”,
describes a number of Burns’ more unusual uses of his raw material, for example, “he, himself a lawyer,
described the lawyers in Celebrations via a treatise on the mating habits of grasshoppers” (194). As will
be seen, this process of incorporating seemingly unrelated material into his texts continues as far as The
Angry Brigade and, although not covered here, is included in the later work The Day Daddy Died.

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(which are, after all, highly erratic at times), however, it is in the described content,

retained from the raw material, where the most important stylistic innovations can be

seen. The numbed, emotionless and brutal atmosphere of Europe After the Rain

remains as the central aesthetic of Burns’ quasi-Imagist style, but what has been

introduced along with the everyday settings are objects. Household items, clothing,

machinery, food and furnishings: all the stuff of production and consumption has

entered into the spaces between characters. The central conflict between Williams and

Michael regarding control of the company takes place almost entirely through

machinery and physical objects - their personal conversations remaining familial albeit

cold. William’s rise from the proletariat begins with his invention of a machine, the

function of which is negligible, that “strove to create the perfect rhythm of work to be

done in any weather…if there was any muscular exertion it was not apparent…there

was a tendency for sweat to be regarded as an anachronism now…morale became a

substance with a practical use… reduced to a mark on a graph” (7). Once in charge of

the factory he “ordered that no variation in working conditions be permitted, the

windows were to remain shut in winter and summer… at first the men found it a little

difficult to acclimatise themselves…but soon it became a pleasant thing” (31). Williams,

as the man in control of the machines, holds power over his workers in a direct sense

by using them as objects. It is these objects that make up the broken images of conflict

when Michael creates his own machine and takes power: “thirty frozen people were

produced in evidence, smashed machines lay instead of food upon the tables” (89). To

the new machines Michael presents “a box of rivets and a little silver medal”, as to the

wives of the thirty dead workers he presents “’as new’ washing machines… dug out of

the mud, trucked back and cleaned with compressed air” (111). Power over people is

made identical with power over objects which, in the endless forward-march of

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capitalist production, is a power conferred on those that control the means of

production. Piecing together narrative from the raw materials of culture, Burns ends up

replacing emotional attachments between individuals with economic production and

object-relations.

The characters themselves - when they are not objects to be appropriated or

destroyed by other characters - are constructed out of objects. Williams sees himself as

the force that drives the company, a living embodiment of each of its functions:

I acquired the capital…I was enterprising… I knew the value of my own

invention… I showed them the frame… I eliminated dangerous bends and
projections… I placed a mirror to satisfy the vanity… I would not have my
customers moved sharply, I protected them like eggs. I strapped them in against
flexible shelves that folded upwards. (39)

All aspects of production are brought together in Williams as director of the company

and living embodiment of all action taking part on the company’s behalf. As such, a

sense not only of power but also of meaning is imparted upon Williams. The purpose

of Williams as a character becomes economic in all relations once Burns has removed

pain and pleasure from his texts. Williams’ sole “romantic” attachment in the novel,

Jacqueline, exists functionally as the dead son Phillip’s property contested between

brother and father. Jacqueline herself is measured in her worth as an advanced

technological object - “subject to an experiment that turned it blue… she was

recognised by her remarkable hair…thus she advanced science” – and falls out of use

when “her tests and experiments were discredited [and] the papers followed a new

lead” (113). Even the most surreal of Burns’ description draw upon the forward motion

of technology as imperative to worth; after Phillip’s body “was buried [and] turned to

earth” it is yet to be free of the demands of innovation as only after a considerable

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time inanimate is he described as having “no further interest in science, in new ideas or

violent action” (20). In Celebrations, Burns succeeds in writing the novel that Burroughs

was criticised for but never fully succeeded in creating; a narrative of the contemporary

age that replaces emotion with economics, humans with objects: an entirely anti-

humanist novel.

Returning from this point to consider some of the other critical reactions to

Alan Burns’ work we can see how this development of an anti-humanist style of novel,

born from an anti-bourgeois writing methodology, extends its attitudes and aesthetics

throughout their many concerns. Michael Dennis Brown, whose piece in the Review of

Contemporary Fiction identifies “the indirect speech quality in much of the allegedly

direct speech between the characters” (207), describes the non-empathetic

relationships between his characters in terms of their alienation from the workings of

the world; yet it could be seen that it is these very workings that, through the cut-up

method, have created this alienation. Other critics have identified with an opposite

reaction, such as Neugeboren who describes Burns’ texts as attempts to “show us…the

texture of life lived” (209). The contradictions between describing the “realistic”

economic make-up of life under capitalism and conveying “realistic” human emotions

arise everywhere in Burns’ texts. It is perhaps for this reason that a return to authorial

intent is needed with experimental texts such as these – not to “explain” the text

entirely, but as a guide for untangling their internal contradictions with reference to

their context and to avoid the temptation to perform an ahistorical deconstruction

which would undermine Burns’ contemporary radicalism.

The reason behind that short interlude regarding authorial intent becomes clear

when we consider 1969’s Babel; a novel that, without some grasp of context or intent,

187
could not unfairly be described as bordering on meaningless. Sentences like “Marlon

Brando watched Hamlet, laughed at a phrase in it, held the world in a drink, ran from

the office in tears” (115), appear without explanation between longer paragraphs, also

unconnected in terms of narrative or content, in a way that obscures patterns of

reading both imaginatively and occasionally even linguistically. The text does, however,

contain certain recurrent themes – sex, religion, war, law – that, like the characters in

Celebrations are connected through a maelstrom of object-relations. Burns, in the 1997

Madden interview, described the text as “a network of recurrent images… not

mechanical, exact repetition, but a near-miss, a variation close enough to give the

reader that satisfying sense of recognition” (129). Like Burroughs’ cut-ups, Babel is

reconstructing association blocks but, unlike Burroughs, Burns is doing so with an

admitted eye to reader response. The vast array of raw material collected and “edited”

by Burns was for him a process of taking “everything that the big city threw away,

everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot” (112) and

presenting it back to his readers as “art” (the work-in-progress title of Babel was itself

“Art By Accident”, suggesting the theoretical work Accident in Art may have also been

in Burns’ mind at this time). The process of creation begins with what has already been

consumed by capitalism. Ephemeral advertisements, pulp fiction, found objects

discarded by their original owners - the waste of yesterday’s culture with its built-in

obsolescence is thrown back into cultural production. As a result, the sections can be

taken or left in different orders, alone or in blocks, and have as much or as little read

into them as seems fitting: much like popular culture under the eye of the media

studies scholar. The overall effect, however, is always one of intense defamiliarisation.

When talking of Babel, Burns later either admits – as he does in The

Imagination on Trial – that he had “fragmented himself out of existence” (164), or else
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conjures external contextual and social backgrounds by which he appears to want the

novel to be read.24 By implication, the text as “a text” is identified less as a novel than

as a pamphlet, banner, newsletter, or a “happening”, to draw on a distinctly late-Sixties

art form. To David Madden he openly talks of such a context as essential to

understanding the text:

Start not with a method but with a mood. The novel was published in 1969,
written in 1967 and 1968. High Days and Holidays, it was a time to be alive!
Events of Paris, “things happening” in London too. The great anti-war…demo
outside the US embassy (there with my wife, met BS. Johnson and others), and
a so called Assembly of Artists, met in a warehouse by the Thames, and so on.
Writers Reading founded then also… I had a feeling I was part of a general
upsurge. I thought we were going to win! (128)

From 1997, Burns takes the view that Babel was part of “the Sixties” - albeit a “Sixties”

not recuperated entirely into the popular de-politicised postmodern image, but more

in keeping with the trajectory outlined in the introduction to this thesis. This

inseparability of the book and its context, of the text and the entire culture, is perhaps

also why Burns’ coverage of Babel in his “Essay” on writing in Beyond the Words barely

name-checks the cut-up technique before immediately moving on to an essay about

the ideological state apparatus:

It was about the power of the state. How in every street, every room, every
shop, every workplace, every school, every institution, and particularly in every
family, the essential pattern of power relations is dictated by the underlying
rules, assumptions and moral principles of the State. Babel described not the
obvious apparatus of dictatorship but the hints nudges nods assents
implications agreements and conspiracies, the network of manipulations that
envelops the citizens and makes them unaware accomplices. (67)

For Burns the project of Babel, his most “experimental” work (in the basic sense that it

contains the least traditional aspects; no story, characters, plot, and a lack of

standardised grammar), is in a way closest to his vision of the world and of art. It is as if

24
A view of Burns’ novels as individual pieces contributing to an overall experimental “movement”
would justify B.S. Johnson’ remarks in his eighth notebook: “BABEL, it needed to be done, the way clear,
now no one else needs to do it – valuable function” (16).

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the book itself is his purest conflict against the system, embodying what he stands for,

leaving him unable to engage with it as a work on its own terms. There is also the

question of how much Burroughs’ influence at this time was making the cut-up form

recognisable if not acceptable; Nova Express, the last of the “cut-up trilogy” appears in

1964 and Dead Fingers Talk appeared from Calder in 1963. A reader of experimental

fiction would likely recognise the cut-up form – it was therefore up to Burns to explain

what he was personally bringing to it.

Looking at a section of the novel we can see how the process of editing raw

material into new, defamiliarising text does inspire in the reader a kind of “shifting of

associations”:

Millions lick their wives. The death houses are bricked up. Police protect their
lives. Energetic foreigners increase trade, the quick-witted work in the central
market. The city is force, the Minister of Order determines policy with the
concurrence of representatives…The city cannot feed itself. Cows are edible. An
abattoir was set up. Water is purchased… Electricity is supplied, the modern
power is fired with dust. Horses are abolished. There are private cars. Trains go
in and out. The underground is low owing to the low ground (111).

Collections of unusual turns of phrase – “the city is force”, “cows are edible”, “horses

are abolished” – are mixed with images that are evocative yet of uncertain meaning –

“death houses”, “modern power is fired with dust”. The section is bookended by an

image of questionable connection to the rest (outside, perhaps, of the police

protecting the licked wives’ lives) and a near-tautology. As a result, the reader is

instigated by the unusual image into making connections, imaginative and

metaphorical leaps, between the proceeding images. Once they reach the final

tautology, the associative train of thought reaches an arbitrary logic loop (the low

underground is under the low ground) which creates a sort of feedback of arbitrariness

affecting the entire meaning of the passage. The reader is essentially forced to work

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out a tenuous inner logic to understand the passage and is then led to understand that

this logic is self-evident. Various techniques are used in the many and heterogeneous

sections that make up Babel but all result in similar distancing effects.

Considering Burns’ attitude to Babel is one closely associated with intense

radical political feeling, it does not seem appropriate to categorise these distancing

effects either as purely ends in themselves or as an aesthetic engine for expressing

conservative disgust at modern society (as Morgan depicts Burroughs’ work). More

appropriate perhaps, is to read the work as a radical New Left demonstration of a

society in need of change. The reader is expected to break from traditions of seeing

and thus gain an “elevated consciousness” with which to offer new and revolutionary

solutions to the old “established” problems of capitalist society. The revolutionary

intention buried within Accident in Art returns here with its implied sense of an

authentic being waiting to be released by experimental practice; a utopian future

submerged between the elements of modern life which a dramatic shift in

consciousness would bring to the fore. Simon Choat identifies this kind of thinking as

the poststructuralist era’s key improvement upon traditional Marxist “vulgar

materialism”; the “iron law of history” is replaced by an “immanent potential [that]

should not be confused with inevitability: it does not mean that the seeds of the future

will grow inexorably from the present. It is not the predetermination of the future but

the connection of the future with the present” (164). The act of creating Babel was for

Burns an authentic means of connecting to contemporary society through writing with

that society’s own artefacts. The process of cutting-up disrupts existing linguistic

patterns used to explain the way things are and forces the things themselves to present

their own internal logics. The form is an absolute refusal of the traditional Aristotelian

structure, the particular meaning of which is described by Milton Friedman in terms of

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a beginning “where the problem to be resolved is first raised, the middle constitutes

the search for a solution, and the end is where the problem is resolved” (65-66). The

novel that solves its own problems may not always be conservative, but it certainly

presupposes a finality to the textual form that begins and ends with narrative. A text

like Babel demands the interpretation of uncertain forms within the act of reading it,

disrupting solutions in an open-ended fashion that implies the continuation of “shifting

associations” beyond the text. Alan Burns’ intention for Babel was therefore half

political-pamphlet, half puzzle-book: reading it would be a kind of “happening”. 25

Burns’ next novel, Dreamerika! (1972), in many ways takes the breakthroughs

of Babel in terms of reader-responsiveness and channels them into a topic less

ambiguous than simply “the State”. Ostensibly its central focus is print culture and,

more specifically, the Kennedys. The sections of type in Dreamerika! are interspersed

with actual headlines from magazines, newspapers, and other assorted publications

(Beyond the Words, 67). The resulting effect serves to make juxtapositions more readily

decipherable as readers can draw on their experiences with these periodical mediums,

the reading style of which is far more “cut-up” than the “top-left to bottom-right”

manner of approaching a novel. The Kennedys were chosen in a manner similar to J.G.

Ballard’s use of Marilyn Monroe and Ronald Reagan in works like The Atrocity

Exhibition (1970); as an example of a universal storyline “much like the Greek and

Roman gods – part of the common language, common reference points, myth”, and

which also resulted in the “Surrealist Fantasy” subtitle being added by a libel-conscious

John Calder (Madden, 1997: 131). The subtitle never sat well with Burns, however, who

25
Burns himself reportedly used writing in a similar manner on a daily basis to provide structure to the
seemingly spontaneous act of holding conversations: “before I meet someone, I make notes of topics
that I’m going to talk about… not important business matters but just chit chat, maybe politics, I don’t
know.” (Coe, 397). This habit, redolent of Burns’ works’ structured spontaneity infuriated B.S. Johnson
whose own sensibilities concerning authenticity were no doubt deeply offended.

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considered surrealism to mean “supertrue” (132) and fantasy to mean “irrational” (and

“with nuclear bombs around, we must be careful not to get too far into the irrational”

(124)). A portmanteau followed by an oxymoron, although suitable for the interior of

the text, was perhaps distancing the empirical too far in terms of the title.

The Kennedy storyline is so warped and distorted from actual historical events

in Dreamerika! that one is forgiven for assuming that Burns was simply pursuing the

same concerns as he did in Babel only with recognisable character names and storyline

attached. Under an advertisement – “THINK BIG” – Burns rails at technocratic

imperialism: “The purpose of USA [sic] is concern with the problem of geometry,

expanding the circumference of the free world… the brutality of number… the global

sum demanded, will enable the arithmetic men to take over” (25). Images of a student

protest being violently attacked by the police are interspersed with tabloid-style

headlines: “Whose Children?”, “Police in New Shock”, “Obsessed with Violence”, “An

Outrage!”, “Poor Little Rich Girl” (58-59). At Jack Kennedy’s funeral, Bobby “sat by a

chair in front of the corpse and sawed through the flesh, carefully separating the

muscles” (67) to pull his heart out. The final scenes that convey Jackie Kennedy’s

marriage to Aristotle Onassis are presented in phantasmagorical, Lewis Carroll-style

images of insane wealth intercut with saccharine phrases from women’s magazines;

some, such as “Clichés Can Come True” (112), delivered with a barbed sarcasm.

Perhaps owing to the juxtaposition of tone between the cut-out headlines and the cut-

up described images, Dreamerika! begins to take on many of the qualities of satire. The

violence and grotesquery, as free of pain as it was in Europe After the Rain, takes on a

certain Swiftian quality when enacted upon identifiable individuals, and the

reappropriation of newsprint to critique media practice had been a staple of Private

Eye since its inception in 1961.

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 The satirical turn in Dreamerika! raises a number of issues regarding Burns’

experimental project and its credentials as simultaneously radical and formally

innovative. Speaking to David Madden in 1994, Burns implies that his writing of the

novel was no longer a project arising organically from the raw material but had, from

the start, a readily identifiable target in the hypocrisy of America as a hegemonic

power: whilst on a visit to the country “I saw Dickensian poverty, faces and bodies

mutilated by bad diet and living conditions… I was appalled”. The processes of Babel,

distorting a worldview by fracturing its images and “shifting association blocks”,

become very similar to simply mocking by exaggeration when an identifiable target is

being attacked in the process. The radical conservative visions of Burroughs are at their

most evocative when they express his fear and loathing of humanity, and later in his life

he returned to the cut-up method as a way of placing curses upon enemies by cutting

together images of them at different times and places. This is not to say that satire is

inherently misanthropic – and certainly not always practiced with the evil intent of

Burroughs’ black magic - but in Burns’ case the move on from Babel, the novel he

attempted to capture all of society within, is a reduction in scope. The utopian

revolutionary becomes the dissenting provocateur.

As I have written about more fully elsewhere, in Alan Burns and B.S. Johnson’s

simultaneous turn to terrorism as a subject matter in their novels of 1973 there is a

sense in which the burn-out of the cultural revolutionary moment of the late Long

Sixties is compounded by the failure to stop the 1971 Industrial Relations Act being

passed and the political imaginations of these two disappointed writers, as a result

turn from mass movements and grand ideas to the desperation of terrorism

(Darlington, “Cell of One”(2014)). The Angry Brigade, an anarchist urban guerrilla

organisation made up of the dissatisfied products of post-war meritocracy (with a mix

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of backgrounds similar to, and overlapping with, the Sixties experimental literary

scene) did indeed take to bombing and sabotage, landing themselves in prison after

the “Stoke Newington Eight” trial of 1972. Both Johnson and Burns attended the trial

to watch from the public galleries and The Angry Brigade went on to inspire The Angry

Brigade, Burns’ first relatively traditional novel since Buster. Reputedly inspired by

Heinrich Boll’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he argued that political novels

needed to be written in “the language of the people” to be effective, Burns structures

his novel around the radicalisation of a group of six fictional people, all of whom

present their opinions through cuttings from interview transcripts (The Imagination on

Trial, 164). “Needless to say it was fiction,” Burns later wrote in The Imagination on

Trial, “those ‘interviews’ were mainly conducted with my friends on topics quite other

than those discussed by the characters in the book” (164).26 The “real” raw materials

from which Burns was building his novel were no longer the ephemera of consumer

capitalism but rather the human opposite; the emotions of real people expressed in

their own natural speech patterns. No longer taking on the State leviathan and its

multitudinous systems of oppression in one big push, Burns was now fighting a

guerrilla war that turned the everyday emotions of life into a narrative of violent

rebellion. Alongside these emotions, Burns’ other “raw material” was becoming

similarly associated with guerrilla warfare – a letter to B.S. Johnson held in the British

Library thanks him for “the manual of the urban guerrilla”, and laments that “I still

don’t know how to make a BOMB!”.

26
“To give a rather curious example: I had a friend, a young woman, who had to visit the dentist on a
number of occasions. This dismal experience was made worse by the fact that as she sat there the
dentist and his nurse, between whom there seemed to be something cooking, would gossip away one to
the other, excluding the patient… [This is rewritten as a periphery character visiting the group’s squat
and] being aware there were things going on that she was not part of, being distressed and disturbed
and a bit frightened” (The Imagination on Trial, 164-165)

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 In many ways The Angry Brigade represents a wish-fulfilment fantasy of

revolution latent throughout Burns’ experimental works and a simultaneous

renunciation of that fantasy. Burns utilises the ambiguity behind the non-specific aims,

objectives and targets of the real Angry Brigade as a means of framing his own political

project within a recognisable contemporary reality. The targets of the characters in The

Angry Brigade are the targets of Burns’ own revolutionary mission: the “total

brainwashing” (5) that keeps people from realising their authenticity and potential. The

revolutionary methods also seem to reflect his own. The climax of the novel, in which

the Ministry of Housing in Whitehall is occupied, is described in terms of “a series of

semi-theatrical situations” (93). The attack is conceived as aleatoric theatre where “we

predicted exactly what would happen and prepared for each possibility” (93); during a

later attack they explain that “in guerrilla actions you have to play it by ear” (182). The

technique of managed chaos is reminiscent of Palach and Burns’ sense of Brando-

esque unscripted authenticity, as well as implying that a utopian, unconscious root lies

beneath all revolutionary activity. When the Angry Brigade disseminate a “Pamphlet on

the Violence of the State” they are even seen to engage in impromptu cutting-up;

“We’d walk through the carriages. It was a Happening. We’d tear a page in half, here’s a

half, here’s a half, get together and read it” (61). The speaker even proposes that “if

some kid of eighteen picks up one of our pamphlets in ten years’ time, he’ll be so

attuned to underground consciousness that he’ll relate to it” (61). One could be

forgiven for suggesting that Burns is using this character as a mouthpiece for his

experimental intention. Burns almost describes it as such; “the Angry Brigade is about

actual concepts rather than intellectual concepts. It’s about the fundamental fantasies,

dreams, madnesses of mankind” (167). The effect, however, of placing these

statements in the mouths of characters demonstrably shown to be flawed is that the

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revolutionary mission is no longer demonstrated but described, and described in a

dismissive manner. By reframing the experimental content within a traditional form,

the narrative itself appears to undermine the message Burns is attempting to present.

In many ways it is a justification of Sixties experimental literatures’ fundamental

assertion that new forms are necessary – yet it is also, in being a traditional narrative

itself, a rejection of those values. In writing about the Angry Brigade as ideologically

laudable yet inevitably doomed romantics, Alan Burns could – consciously or not - be

said to be writing about himself and his fellow experimental novelists as the Sixties

comes to an end.

Speaking in the Madden interview, Burns claimed that the novel was written in

sympathy with the actual Angry Brigade (or at least the Stoke Newington Eight) and

was an attempt to “correct [the tabloid] version of red-baiting, by showing the true

process of radicalisation” (115). After the book was published and was “generally seen

as an attack on the ‘real’ Angry Brigade”, including in an angry letter to Time Out

written by Stuart Christie, Burns recounts his frustration; “the darned thing is I wrote

the novel in protest against… the demonising” (128). Such frustration, as well as an

assortment of disillusioning factors, spells the end of Burns’ novel writing until 1981’s

The Day Daddy Died. The Angry Brigade could perhaps be considered as a final spelling

out of his intentions as an experimenter with the novel form but, framed in a non-

experimental form, it is also an unconscious distancing from those earlier beliefs. The

culmination of his cut-up, transcription, found material, audio recording as well as a

host of other techniques into a readable “documentary novel” about both counter-

culture and urban guerrilla warfare could almost be read as an attempt to clarify the

role Burns had envisioned for himself throughout the Sixties. Once the “High Days and

Holidays” that birthed Babel gave way to the depression, struggle and turmoil of the
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Seventies, The Angry Brigade appears as a final attempt at a clear enunciation of his

message; one that is, perhaps inevitably, misinterpreted as attacking the exact people it

was aimed at supporting. In the move away from “experiments” in language and image

that confront the reader, however, the dynamic radicalism of Burns’ disruptive prose is

replaced by an attempt at realism which sits awkwardly with Burns’ approach.

Concerning “experimental” literature in terms of the particular form it inhabited in the

Sixties, what The Angry Brigade suggests is that – for Burns at least – the moment for

formal innovation and consciousness-raising is over and a new moment of conflict has

begun; the materiality of which undermines his claims to radical newness and

perceives his texts as the “bourgeois avant garde” form he had always considered

himself against. In terms of tracing the British experimental novel’s trajectory through

the Sixties, the career of Alan Burns is quintessential.

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Chapter 5: “Another City, Same Hotel”: Ann Quin and the Happening Society

5.1: The Permissive Moment

Before addressing the works of Ann Quin directly it is important to present the context

in which they originally appeared.27 The graphic sexual content of Quin’s works

operates as part of an aesthetic whole and, as such, does not necessarily warrant

comment in and of itself. However, such is the nature of censorship that such a

nuanced literary approach is only available once the threat of government prosecution

has been lifted. As well as the many other favourable conditions that we have seen

playing a role in shaping the Sixties cultural boom, an understanding of the nature of

the “permissive society” is essential. Yet it would be remiss to presume that the

relaxation of censorship is a simple case of liberty increasing as time goes on. In

addressing the Sixties it is much more effective historically to think of a “permissive

moment” beginning sometime after the Lady Chatterley Trial in 1960 and coming to an

end with the Oz Trial of 1971. The Seventies backlash redrew debates on censorship in

ways that have reverberated ever since and a failure to account for such historical

changes blinds us to the dramatic cultural debates of which Ann Quin’s writing is part.

Writing in his study on modern censorship Freedom’s Frontier, Donald Thomas

presents the context of the Chatterley Trial as directly related to the new 1959 Obscene

Publications Act. “With a new law in place,” according to Thomas’ account, “the next

step was a test case” (241). From this perspective, the “obscenity” of Lawrence’s novel

was not so exceptional as to demand government intervention, but was rather the

unlucky scapegoat upon which the crown could test its new powers. In terms of the

27
Robert Buckeye’s 2013 pamphlet Re: Quin appeared too late to be included within this chapter. As the
work contains no new research this should not pose too great a problem.

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content leading to the obscenity charge “language was the problem. There remained a

presumption that the use of certain words in print was criminal [and these] the

Prosecuting council was to point out as meticulously as an abacus” (242). With these

particular offending words listed and presented to the jury as sufficient evidence of

obscenity, the case then fell to the defence to prove that – in spite of this – the work

was overall “for the public good, as being in the interests of literature, art or science”

(243). The issue then became one of taste and, more specifically, a perceived

patriarchal set of standards determined by whether “you would wish your wife or

servants to read” the novel. The “not guilty” verdict reached may have set in motion a

number of revolutionary changes in terms of cultural freedoms, but the terms upon

which it was reached remained strictly determined by the Establishment. In order to

determine obscenity, it is implied, one must either be male and bourgeois, or else defer

to the tastes and morality of those that are.

By 1971, however, the terms upon which the Oz Trial determined obscenity had

monumentally shifted, with the debate resulting in the longest obscenity trial in British

legal history. Published between the passing of the “guilty” verdict and the overturn by

appeal, Tony Palmer’s account of the proceedings, The Trials of Oz, bears witness to the

breadth of both sides’ sociocultural concerns. By pasting Rupert the Bear’s head onto a

Robert Crumb cartoon strip, Oz 28 set the scene for a clash of civilisations. For the

prosecution, the magazine appeared as “nothing more or less than propaganda” that

“left you with an ugly taste in your mouth” which represented “the very epitome… of

the so-called permissive society” (193). In response, the defence argued that,

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 those who grew up in the early fifties were known as the ‘Silent Generation’…
but suddenly it became too dangerous to be complacent any longer. Old
gentlemen with cigars and curly moustaches could push buttons which might
blow up the whole world. So young people came into the streets with their
duffel coats and guitars to protest. (235)

The very fate of the world is seen to be at stake and in judging whether or not an image

of a woman wearing a strap-on dildo is obscene the jury could be dooming the nation

to either a future of absolute depravity or nuclear holocaust. The bathetic quality of

this discourse is emphasised by the prurience and humourlessness of the prosecution

when dissecting the magazine in question and the wilful refusal of the defence to

accept any possibility of offence being caused. That “nobody objected to taking

schoolchildren to art galleries where they could frequently see ‘ladies with little attire

on’” (140) appeared to be the end of the debate on “protecting” children from nudity,

as far as the Oz editorial staff was concerned. Such an attitude, perhaps even more

controversial today than in 1971, illustrates how our reading of the “permissive

society” cannot be reduced to liberal concerns about the state and free speech. The

radical conception of a totally repressive society in need of liberation challenges the

fundamental premises of such a “rational” and “objective” bourgeois approach. It is

this figure of the sexual revolutionary that frames the wandering of Passages and

haunts the sado-masochistic orgies of Tripticks in the figure of “Nightripper”.

The “revolutionary” case against censorship was not, however, the only case –

nor even a popular one during the Sixties. A consideration of the BBC’s increasing

creative freedom under Hugh Greene and “anti-Establishment” satire such as Private

Eye seeking the liberalisation of libel law demonstrates how “mainstream” such

opinions were becoming.28 It is against this general Sixties “permissiveness” that Mary

Whitehouse’s National Viewers and Listeners Association (or NVALA) positioned itself

28
British obscenity law is a subsection of libel law.

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and, as a result, could also frame its debate as “anti-Establishment”; standing against

what it believed to be a corrupt, decadent, and left-wing propagandist state media. 29

Although largely brushed aside during the Sixties heyday of “permissiveness”, the

overturning of the Oz Trial verdict led NVALA to launch the Nationwide Petition for

Public Decency, a “plea for a strengthening of the obscenity laws” (Thompson, 275)

which reached 1,350,000 signatories by April 1973. This petition arguably set in motion

the expansion of censorship in the form of the Broadcasting and Television Act 1974.

From the perspective of NVALA and those in sympathy with their cause, the slackening

of obscenity laws was not a series of gradual victories against those in power but rather

an on-going imposition by the powerful who were promoting attitudes calculated to

erode traditional ways of life. Censorship was therefore a question of social

responsibility, albeit one driven by authoritarian Christian values.

The frame of reference for obscenity was largely defined by cinema and

television in public debate. Although this debate certainly had an impact upon the

literary production of the Sixties – cinema being a key influence upon Quin’s Tripticks,

for example - the “permissive moment” that had so liberated the printed word had its

closest correlative in theatrical production. Unlike broadcast media or the mass-market

film, theatre appears only in the moment of its action upon the stage (or beyond the

stage, as shall be seen in the case of Happenings). This not only left it relatively

untouched by arguments concerning “captive audiences”, but – more importantly –

also placed it under a different regulatory body. Until 1968 this was the Lord

Chamberlain’s Office. Having been “repeatedly exposed as inefficient, unfair and

29
In a speech to the Rationalist Press Association’s annual conference in 1970, John Calder introduced
himself in terms of his role as “Secretary in the Defence of Literature and the Arts Society, the principle
body fighting Mary Whitehouse and fighting the various bodies that are trying to turn the clock back”
(“The Novel”, 52).

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absurd” (148), according to Richard Findlater, “several managers, for the first time in a

century, had actually joined playwrights, actors and critics in supporting its abolition”

(149). A government enquiry, launched in 1966, resulted in the Theatres Act of 1968

which essentially abolished formal public censorship of theatrical productions in

Britain. Such a move can be seen to be deeply rooted within the cultural-economic

climate of the time with the satire boom, adaptations of the novels of the “Angry Young

Men”, and playwrights like Joe Orton (whose central premise, according to John Lahr

was that there were “no basic human values. Man was capable of every bestiality” (7))

achieving great success and critical acclaim. The potential for censorship or obscenity

charges to upset a successful theatre run added an undesirable level of precariousness

at a time when the “permissive society” was good business and “Swinging London”

was driving a boom in consumption. Its removal was of obvious benefit to West End

theatre, but also opened up space for the new, radical forms in which Quin was

involved.

When considering the British cultural landscape in regards to the “permissive

moment” literature and theatre arise as the two privileged spaces of cultural

production. Once the novelty of free expression had become stale and oppositional

shock-tactics tired these spaces would eventually present forums for the exploration of

“permissiveness” as a radical state of being.30 By considering Ann Quin, whose life and

works enjoy considerable interplay between these spaces, we can therefore engage

with the “permissive society” on its own terms as both a product of and a conduit for

experimental practice. More than any other writer in this thesis, Quin presents an

intersection between the diffuse networks of radicalism and liberalism, working class

30
Calder himself complained of how “one of the effects of the permissive society has been that erotica is
no longer a guarantee that the book is going to sell” (“The Novel”, 51).

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and bourgeois forms, feminist theory and sexuality, and the transatlantic movements,

circles, concepts, and environments that created the grand cultural signifier now

collectively known as “the Sixties”. By reading her works within this historical context,

their deep ambiguities of character, narrative and expression emerge as traumas of

liberation starkly prescient of the historical path leading to our contemporary

condition.

5.2: Desublimation Through Style

The writing of Ann Quin has never drawn the levels of critical attention that the likes of

Christine Brooke-Rose or B.S. Johnson have received – although, as with B.S. Johnson,

Quin seems to be making an academic reappearance in the twenty-first century. A

writer from a South-East working class background whose novels were published by

John Calder – a company synonymous with challenge and experiment – her works carry

much of the cultural ambiguity that she herself represents as a figure. From the gritty

Brighton setting of her first novel, Berg (1964), to the comic-strip pop culture of her last

completed novel, Tripticks (1972), Quin’s work often draws upon the material and

mental poverty of proletarian experience in order to create its otherworldly narratives

and phantasmagoric imagery. In his piece in Context No. 8, “Reading Ann Quin’s Berg”,

Giles Gordon introduces her in the context of the other experimental writers, part of a

group “concerned about the novel as art form”. For these writers, the breakthroughs of

writers like Alan Sillitoe or John Braine represented “working class vernacular posing as

social realism” and that a “novel for the times” must have more of the qualities of

being “manufactured by tape recorder, a verbal equivalent of cinema verite”. It is a

theme Gordon returns to in his introduction to the reprinted edition of Quin’s Berg,

suggesting that “here was a working class voice from England quite unlike any other,

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[combining] the theatrical influences of John Osborne [with] the technical advances of

the nouveau roman” (ix). The desire to be “more real” than social realism through

experiment seems to be the key to accessing Quin’s style from an academic

perspective.

On a purely stylistic level, Quin’s novels already present a challenge to the critic.

Her ability to utilise polyphony not only between individual subjects but within and

across subjects marks a radical break not only from traditional notions of monologue

and dialogue but also from the kind of “ontological levels” that McHale considers

central to postmodernism. Rather than offer distinct levels and subjectivities that

become more fragmented, Quin offers a literature of osmosis wherein nothing remains

stable yet everything is connected. Evenson and Howard, in their article “Ann Quin”,

describe this flow through a visual metaphor in which “the narration functions like an

invasive camera, with actions and events unfolding cinematically, simultaneously with

the dialogue and the narration”. However, whereas such techniques create a natural

mimetic language in cinema, Quin’s appropriation of a similar approach results in an

“almost unique claustrophobic equalisation of the narration; one moves from one

narrative level to another abruptly and often without warning”. The “invasive camera”

doesn’t produce a detached cinematic gaze but the dizzying totality of complete

immersion, a sense of drowning in sensation.

An excellent example of the kind of writing for which Quin receives critical

praise is presented within the first pages of her first novel, Berg, where the titular

character is presented to the reader in his boarding house room with the mise en scene

(to refer back to a cinematic terminology) provoking expressions of past and future

experiences;

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 Once he had ventured across, and brought back a giggling piece of fluff, that
flapped and flustered, until he was incapable, apologetic, a dry fig held by sticky
hands. Well I must say you’re a fine one, bringing me all the way up here, what
do you want then, here are you blubbering, oh go back to Mum. Lor’ wait until I
tell them all what I got tonight, laugh, they’ll die. Longing to be castrated;
shaving pubic hairs. Like playing with a doll, rising out of the bath, a pink jujube,
a lighthouse, outside the rocks rose in body, later forming into maggots that
invaded the long nights, crawled out of sealed walls, and tumbled between the
creases in the sheets (4).

From the first sentence, appearing in context in the middle of a longer paragraph, the

memory of an unsuccessful sexual encounter is delivered in the third person, second

person and then with a reduced use of personal pronouns. The “invasive camera”

would appear to move between present, past and delirious states all held within the

character-space of Berg. The transmogrifications of the phallus move through impotent

“dry fig”, feminine plaything “doll”, landscape “lighthouse”, and finally numerous

invading contaminations in the form of nocturnal “maggots”. Quin’s use of language

here negotiates a certain cosmic unity of symbols which subsumes subject and object

alike under a symbolic order which transgresses linear time and physical laws in a kind

of total pathetic fallacy.

For different critics, Quin’s “claustrophobic” literature presents different

challenges to established literary practice. Lee Rourke, writing in The Independent,

finds that her writing (and most especially Berg) “simply eschews the superfluous dilly-

dallying of our established humanistic tradition and cuts straight to place, movement

and time”. In having a scalpel-like ability to cut directly into the real, Quin’s writing

sidesteps not only the formal aspects of “traditional” novels but also the “humanistic”

ideology of the sacrosanct individual which informs those forms. Philip Stevick too

highlights the anti-humanist capacity of Quin’s writing to denigrate the unity of the

individual over experience, suggesting that most dialogue “is not remembered

conversation. No such conversation has taken place, or will” (232). Rather, for Stevick,

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Quin’s novels present “the mind as a theatre both of remembered wound and of

desire… the subject is the leading character with the best lines, often the only lines”

(232). Loraine Morley unpacks further these elements of desire, describing Quin’s

writing as “’promiscuous’; in the sense that it no more concerns itself with consistency

either of textual or sexual identity than with supporting a sociocultural tradition of

monogamy” (128). Quin’s novels are scalpels, love affairs, theatres; all subsuming the

rational and objective - the individual - to a sense of unbounded vitality. The novels

stage the collapse of all repressive structures the more directly to live within the flow

of experience itself.

The reduction in censorship provides the context to Quin’s writing, not simply

with regards to its provocative content but also in terms of the honesty which such

content implies. Quin finds in the removal of physical barriers between people a

possibility to dissolve the emotional and ideological barriers structuring bourgeois

society. Her stylistic practice, a sort of communal consciousness, emerges through the

collapse of “restraint”; a concept absolutely central to individualistic consciousness.

Only within this privileged space at this historical moment could these novels emerge

as they do – explorations of liberation not in the sense of individual liberty but as a

mode of being. In writing of such a moment in Eros and Civilisation, Herbert Marcuse

contends that it is at this level of civilisation when social repression no longer takes the

form of prohibition, but is built into the ideological mode of enjoyment and “free

expression”. This reconciliation of freedom with repression involves a unity of being the

likes of which we find expressed in Quin’s works:

Imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of

desire with realisation, of happiness with reason… The truths of imagination are
first realised when phantasy itself takes form, when it creates a universe of

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 perception and comprehension – a subjective and at the same time objective
universe. This occurs in art. (Marcuse, 144)

For this reconciled subject, the idea of repression as an externally imposed prohibition

is held in contempt in the fashion of the Oz Trial defendants when faced with obscenity

charges; the law appears artificial, arbitrary, absurd. For the “permissive society” the

only limits imposed should be internal limits which, in turn, can only be realised in a

context of total liberty in order to exist for-themselves. However, for all the “freedom”

that this permissiveness entails, the actuality is perhaps more repressive, according to

Marcuse. Finn Bowring examines Marcuse’s concept of “repressive desublimation” in

his 2012 paper; describing it as “a relaxing of those taboos that previously required the

deflection of the instincts, but this relaxation remains repressive in its overall logic and

effect” (16). The subject has, at this “level of civilisation”, internalised repression to the

extent that the demands of desire are structured into repressive models for the benefit

of reproducing the dominant mode of production.

When considering Quin’s ability to write between subjectivities, effectively

resulting in a stream-of-consciousness overflowing individual consciousnesses, Philip

Stevick notes how “reading backwards from Quin, one is struck by the incredible

sweetness of temper in most of those classic characters in the modernist literature of

the inner life” (233). Compare the use of classical mythology in Ulysses and the

ruminations of Bloom to its more “vulgar” usage in Quin and we can begin to feel the

vitality incumbent upon “repressive desublimation”. As the protagonist of Tripticks

pilots his car which “could hurdle skyscrapers, leap an eighth of a mile” he

contemplates his female companion “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter

than Mercury, stronger than Hercules”, before leaving her in the desert and pursuing

“Liberty and Independence or Death” (51). Driving into the sunset we are told that

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“homicide can be fun and we today can build a great cathedral of the spirit” (51).

Power, knowledge and the spirit – the arena of the Gods – are not here channelled in

the interests of growth or understanding (“sublimation”) but in the interests of

enjoyment which must forever overcome itself with increasing levels of hyperbole to

remain within the ecstatic moment. The Gods aren’t lending resonance and meaning to

the world as higher powers, they are avatars for a totalising will; no longer imposing

the moral law, they become the laws which are beyond good and evil.

The relationships in Quin’s novels embody this cruel irony by which a unity of

experience between separate subjects makes them more alone, less comprehensible.

In Passages, the closeness of a couple, once “freed” from the traditions of subject and

object in love, becomes a form of shared entity within a solipsistic world of perception.

A typical passage is found when they are on a train, the male protagonist writing,

“something about getting completely high while mobile, not subjected to one’s own

mobility. Fantastic dance of images, shapes, forms. Shadows flowing past” (38). The

couple is then described as “mediums inhabiting each others’ imagination” (39) within

the main column, whilst in the left-side column (a graphic device indicating that what is

being written is a comment on the main column) he questions “What would it be like

to get completely outside our bodies?” and “She likes to think people look upon her as

essentially quite mad, almost a prerequisite for any lover she has” (39). The sense of

perceptual unity embodied in “getting completely high while mobile” draws the couple

together in one movement – inhabiting a shared imagination – whilst in another equal

and opposite movement driving them to desire total release into obscurantism;

madness and incorporeality. The “traditional” monogamistic couple is structured as a

binary whereby each forms the object of the others’ desire, yet here the couple is

allowed to transcend their exclusivity and satisfy a desire for total immersion. From this
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point, however, desire can only but move elsewhere – or, in the hypersensual writing of

Quin, everywhere. The deferred gratification, or “sublimation”, of monogamy is

replaced by momentary satisfaction; a “desublimation” which enslaves the subjects

ever more overwhelmingly to the pursuit of insatiable desire.

In his work on the logic of consumption in capitalist society, Slavoj Ẑiẑek

identifies insatiable desire with the systematic overconsumption that defines the

contemporary mode of production. He identifies how in psychoanalysis “access to

knowledge is… paid with the loss of enjoyment – enjoyment, in its stupidity, is possible

only on the basis of certain non-knowledge, ignorance” (The Sublime Subject of

Ideology, 73). In his lecture on “The Superego and the Act” he presents this form of

enjoyment with the example of “caffeine-free diet Coke” in which “we drink

Nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a property… The more profit you have, the

more you want, the more you drink Coke, the more you are thirsty, the more you obey

the superego command, the more you are guilty”. Žižek’s Lacanian model and

Marcuse’s Frankfurt School approach are here mutually supporting in terms of the

essential end-point of the “permissive society” and the final trajectory of Quin’s

narratives. In internalising the repression that constitutes “civilisation” (social

responsibility and conscience) we are similarly internalising the (superego) imperative

to enjoy. When the superego demands enjoyment it is formulated as a moral good

which would then identify the blockages to attaining this good – censorship and

obscenity laws – as moral evils. The capitalist system demands overconsumption in

order to reproduce itself, and allies permissiveness to its cause, because (once

internalised) it is a more effective form of pacification than force and restraint. The

desire which is then mobilised, however, loses much of the ideological frippery

demanded of sublimation and is reduced to a vague and automatic hunger. This

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alienated consumption haunts Quin’s imagery; sexual intercourse is reduced to “the

manoeuvring of… limbs, as though they were assorted feelers searching for a hiding

place” (Berg, 43 – 44), in one stark example. In many ways, Quin’s writing represents

one of the fullest explorations of the abjection at the heart of total consumption which

is available to us from the Britain of the Sixties. She presents a dark mirror of the

“Swinging London” of collective imagination.

The abject, as the lived core of experience dragged onwards by insatiable

desire, “takes place [at] a crossing over of the dichotomous categories of Pure and

Impure, Prohibition and Sin, Morality and Immorality” (Kristeva, 16). As Julia Kristeva

noted in her work on Celine, Powers of Horror, abjection brings together fragmented

writing under a different rubric to purely linguistic analysis; words appear connected

erratically across an existential void, as opposed to being connected by semantic

meaning. Such fragments of speech mean that “thanks to them but without stating

them, an affect breaks out, in sound and outcry, bordering close on drive and abjection

as well as fascination. Bordering on the unnameable” (204). Quin seems to evoke such

readings, especially in deeply affective sections such as the “transcriptions” in Three.

The narrative of Three explores the suicide of “S” through S’s diary (in which she is

written about in the third person) and transcripts from S’s tape recordings. The diary

presents an external narrative which frames these spoken word passages. That “S” was,

by her own account, emotionally erratic, lodged within a complicated triangular

relationship and, after writing, killed herself – ties the writing into the “unnameable” of

abjection;

Waiting
For that
First faint light. In a darkened room. Hurt me hurt
Me hurt me

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 There
Here
Anywhere. This way. If you like. Talk to me talk.
Talk
To
Me
Was it like this with
Never before. Not like this. No one has touched me ever
Never never
Like this. Before. Like waves. The coming
Slowly. Dual Roles
Realised. Yes yes
Yes.
Be a boy. If you like. Anything. Be
Just be. (114)

Within this section of writing there recur the uncertain voices critics such as Stevick

and Morley have described; spoken mentally or vocally, in past or present, in reality or

fantasy, it is intentionally uncertain. The effect upon the graphic surface of seeing this

thin strip of words cascading down a large white space is such that they appear to

float, detached from the rational bourgeois narrative represented by the “standard”

typography of the Leonard and Ruth sections, only to make the impact more severe as

the words themselves are read. The abjection of “S” as a subject becomes identified

with the blank space of the page upon which requests for contact are stamped. The

language, framed by the sexual nature of the narrative, is nevertheless entirely about

receiving contact in a wider sense – as if “S” is incapable of her own agency; “hurt me,”

“talk to me,” and then just “talk,” “just be”. In the midst of reverie, what begins as a

desire for a palpable and defined object becomes a total desire, a desire for “anything”,

as it becomes apparent that beyond desire there is now nothing left.

The essentially void-like state of abjection is notably powerless not simply in its

vulnerability to outside invasion and influence, but also structurally in its inability to

conceive of linear time. Without an internal chronology by which to gauge sublimation

of desire into constructive outcomes, the “desublimated” state of abjection cannot but
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totalise desire as there is only its direct experience within the moment. For Loraine

Morley, this state of writing within Quin’s texts exists with “the nebulous hinterland

between patriarchal subjectivity and sexual identity, on the one hand, and the abject

state of maternal engulfment on the other; the impossible choice between a violent,

violating language not [her] own, and silence” (130). The Oedipal situation that

maintains bourgeois hegemony is then translated into “Father as language” and

“Mother as silence”. Such a conception of the structures of language as a force for

domination exists throughout Quin’s works in various ways, although it is only in her

unfinished manuscript for The Unmapped Country – published in Giles Gordon’s

collection, Beyond the Words, in 1975 and which “could have been her most

considerable work” (“Intro”, 11) – that it becomes a central aspect of the narrative. The

novel features Sandra, a patient in a psychiatric ward, who refuses to undertake

treatment. The situation is introduced in terms of her refusing to talk in therapy.

However, when faced with the psychiatrist “she knew he would continue writing even if

she did not say anything. Every gesture noted” (252). Although perhaps less subtle than

her other published works, the allegory of “psychiatric hospital as society”

nevertheless indicates Quin’s own awareness of issues of power and writing; that

subjects are “written” by discourse in spite of themselves.

In spite of Quin’s nuanced usage of style to convey the terror and

powerlessness of abjection, however, it is also important to consider her works

historically against the backdrop of sexual liberation which informed the “permissive

society”. To indicate simply that Quin’s works demonstrate the working of repressive

desublimation, often in spite of themselves, is to miss the historical vitality that drove

such currents and the often radical deconstruction of “traditional values”

(authoritarian ideology) and the power structures they upheld. Returning to the couple
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in Passages that have been seen to exist in an abject state of unity (rather than a

binary-monogamy), the challenge that they present to “traditional” repressive

structures could be considered revolutionary (in that it does away with them

altogether). Introduced to an orgy sequence, which by this stage of the narrative

appears a standard ritual, we are told of an “afternoon spent with naked bodies,

sunlight and hashish. She fell in love with her own sensuality” (95). Here the scene has

become desublimated; entered into a timeless, boundaryless space of insatiable desire.

From this setting we are then introduced to her perspective: “when she saw him make

love to another woman she became aware for the first time of his body, as a physical

thing” (95). This sexual encounter isn’t framed in reaction to monogamy as a form of

protest or “sin”; it is experienced as a process of differentiation against the backdrop of

sensual unity. It is a curious re-learning of subjectivity in a world subsumed entirely

within one consciousness. As we look to the left-hand column (indicating a comment

upon the main text) we can see that this narcissistic process of re-learning the world

extends to the transcendental level in the form of the Greek Gods: “Primitive Greek

mirrored his own human relations in the figures of his gods”, “The matriarchal

goddesses reflect the life of women, not women the life of the goddesses” (95). Against

the authoritarian values of monotheistic Christian Britain, Quin’s orgiastic explorations

represent a kind of anti-Copernican revolution in consciousness. There are no infallible

higher powers around which our lives revolve - it only appears that way from our

perspective within our historical conditions. Undermining the authority of “objectivity”,

this idea stands as a considerable threat to bourgeois values in their contemporary

reification.

5.3: Artaud and Ritual

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The particular anti-bourgeois flavour of the Sixties as a cultural myth is heavily tied to

notions of anti-rationalist, vitalist, and some would say obscurantist feeling as a more

direct means of cultural expression. Such feeling was not limited to radicals and

outsiders, but was starting to inform the established cultural industry. Perhaps the

most totemic moment of such a shift was the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1964

“Theatre of Cruelty” season at LAMDA. Jinnie Schiele, in describing the season, finds its

origins in the two central figures of Charles Marowitz – who “brought group

experiment from America” – and Peter Brook who brought “a sound knowledge of

commercial West End theatre” (xii). The resulting season “achieved enormous publicity,

both good and bad, and helped kickstart the underground movement of alternative

theatre” (xii). Although this “Fringe” theatre would not truly explode as a movement

until 1968 and the end of theatre censorship, the acceptance of Antonin Artaud into

the ultimate British theatre Establishment, the RSC, is a sure indicator of the

prevalence of anti-bourgeois ideas; even if such ideas remained of the modernist avant

garde variety. Indeed, an equally demonstrative indicator of how Artaud’s works were

being co-opted lies in the fact that his collected essays, The Theatre and Its Double,

from which the term “Theatre of Cruelty” is derived, did not appear in English

translation until John Calder commissioned it for his Signatures series in 1970. Upon

publication, it very quickly became a “best-seller” and one of Calder’s “most

important” printings (Calder, 376). Prior to 1970, Artaud’s rise to popularity could have

occurred only among French speakers or those who shared their circles; a distinctly

metropolitan trait in Francophobic England.

It can be seen that Antonin Artaud’s appearance as a central influence on the

British theatre of the Sixties erupts from the same “permissive society” as Ann Quin.

Artaud calls for the dismantling of the traditional restraints placed upon the theatre in
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the same radical language; “a kind of horrible poetry is… expressed in bizarre acts,

where changes in the facts of life show its intensity undiminished, needing only to be

better directed” (4). The revolutionary sense of moving towards a libidinally liberated

society is compounded by Artaud’s personal biography which also reflects the concerns

of contemporary radical thought – drugs, schizophrenia, the esoteric – with the grace-

saving caveat that Artaud himself was safely dead. Artaud’s demand that “there must

be a poetry of the senses just as there is for speech,” (26) is as equally relevant to

Quin’s hypersensual prose as it is to theatre and, for that matter, to the new ubiquity of

television and jarring energies of rock music. The space beyond and between meaning

in signifiers, which we earlier identified with the abject, lies at the heart of Artaud’s

theatrical project wherein “the thoughts it expresses escape spoken language” (26).

Such a project also entails the renunciation and subsequent reclamation of “past

masterpieces[;] fit only for the past, they are no good to us” (53). Some, such as

Marowitz and his Open Space theatre group, chose the literal interpretation of these

words, as described earlier, and presented “Shakespeare ‘cut-ups’” (Schiele, 15) with

titles like A Macbeth, An Othello, and Variations on the Merchant of Venice. Others

took a less direct approach by incorporating classical deities or characters from the

canon into their works, sometimes for ironic purpose yet equally to invoke the

Dionysian spirit of “pre-rational” theatre. 31

The content of Quin’s writings intersects with the Artaud-inspired aesthetic in

two directions. Firstly, she can be seen to describe a number of improvisational pieces

of theatre within her narratives. Quin herself was theatrically trained and sought a
31
It is Artaud who allegedly first brought Marowitz into contact with the Calder circle – specifically Alan
Burns, his collaborator on Palach. Schiele describes an event reported in the Guardian (30th April 1970)
when a local dignitary at the Harrogate Festival spoke of “the need for modern artists to remember the
affairs of the spirit” (92) and used Burns as an example of one failing in this. Burns then jumped on stage
and recited Artaud’s poem “Shit to the Spirit”, at which point Marowitz too jumped on stage “crying, ‘I
commission you to write a play’” (92).

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career in theatre before taking up writing – a career cut short by crippling stage fright.

In these pieces, the energies Quin sought to exercise on the stage can be found

sublimated upon the page. Such pieces, like the memory of “mime plays” (142) in

Three, carry Artaudian faux-mystical overtones - they wear “white robes…like a

priestess – a sort of goddess” (142) – and are libidinally charged. The “rather

transparent” robes, worn with “nothing else”, grant “freedom of movement [and] a

sense of power” to the actress. The style of writing is that which leads Stevick to

conclude that “clothes, in Quin, are always erotic” (235). For Stevick, Quin conjures a

perspective where “the world is seen as in a visual composition, often simultaneously

heard. And as it is seen and heard, it presses against the musculature of the body,

against the nerve ends, and is felt on the skin” (238). It is Quin’s inimitable style that

constitutes the other direction of Artaudian movement. Not only does she describe

theatrical productions within her narratives, but her narratives themselves instil similar

principles and, as such, can reach out and lay this perspective across history. The

Greece of Passages is constructed between transcendental historical images in such a

manner. A total pan-subjective pan-historical view appears in which “veins shifted with

shapes” (13). “Tastes of bread, smells of synagogues. Sperm. The drying of that

between pyramids, she pressed together,” suggests a certain timeless, sexually-driven

mysticism whilst the still-palpable imagery of the Second World War – most clearly the

massacres in Crete - creates a landscape from “incinerators”, “guns, engines controlled

the screams”, “line of men against the wall, blindfolded, they fell forward” (13). As a

means of introducing us to the narrative, Quin is calling on the “thoughts that escape

spoken language” in a montage made up of resonant images that nevertheless refuse

to resonate with each other in a simple linear manner. In refusing narrative, history

becomes pure affect.

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 Against the backdrop of a non-linear experience of history we can see a return

to ritual, both in Artaud and in Quin’s own writings, as a means of imposing

transcendental structures without recourse to the ideology of “progression”. The

multifaceted layering of mythic structures and allusions that fill Quin’s novels present a

clear challenge to reviewers. Rourke, in attempting to unpack these structures in his

review of Berg, identifies it as “Freudian, Oedipal, and steeped in Greek tragedy, but

also a heady mix of the postmodern, grotesque and the macabre”; the suggestion

being that the overall storyline of a son seeking to kill his father is not the simple

Freudian reworking that it appears. Rourke’s use of “the postmodern” as a means of

identifying this uncomfortable appropriation is telling. Other than the first line of the

novel – “a man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town

intending to kill his father” (xv) – there is little character development to help the

reader understand Berg’s patricidal tendencies. Berg’s desire to kill his father is the

unchallengeable certainty driving the narrative. From the humanistic psychological

tradition, this is the novel refusing to present its internal logic. Once characters are no

longer driven by rational imperatives then the unspoken imperatives that are left

appear only as embodiments of fate or chance. Such constructions of fate then return

to the ritual structures that pre-date rationalism. However, the approach to these

rituals has fundamentally changed. In an interview quoted by Mackrell in Evenson and

Howard, Quin describes her Catholic school experience as essential to her thinking; “a

ritualistic culture that gave me a conscience, a death wish, and a sense of sin. Also a

great lust to find out, experience, what evil really was”. If we take “evil” as the

Manichean movement away from God – in opposition with the “good” movement

towards God – then we can see why the framework of ritual and fate would remain

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unchallenged. If ritual represents the timeless structures of life then an “evil” desire to

escape is as structured against its opposite desire; to conform.

We can think of this narratologically. The Oedipal narrative of Berg doesn’t find

resolution in castration, as in Freud, but stages the eternal return of the father figure.

The incident framing the first “killing” of the father occurs at a bonfire on Guy Fawkes

Night. Berg is positioned across the fire from his father who was “looking vaguely like

him, clutching a bottle” (72), when his father’s dummy is thrown into the fire by the

crowd. This dummy, associated with the father from the first, can be seen to stand for

the phallus. Rescuing it from the fire and returning it to his father, Berg then

accompanies his father home while deciding that “definitely this time it [the killing]

would be accomplished” (74). In rescuing his father’s dummy from the tribal crowd,

Berg has proven himself superior and usurped the phallus from the father. Between the

night and the morning (a chapter break) it is assumed that the killing was

“accomplished”, with the father’s corpse “rolled up in the rug” (75). The continually-

thwarted task now is for Berg to hide the body. Throughout his mission he remains

unrepentant, arguing that “surely I’ve served imprisonment long enough, this, now, is

my birthright, the after-birth is theirs to cope with, along with the rest of the country’s

cosy mice in their cages of respectability” (81). The threat is enough, however, that

once he has relieved himself of the body he takes an “almost erotic pleasure” (117) in

disguising himself as a woman to make his escape. At this point, the father returns and

– mistaking him for his former (now Berg’s) lover – ravishes him. We now realise that

the “corpse” rolled in the rug was actually the dummy. Taking the dummy as the

phallus, Berg can be seen to usurp it from his father and yet, through social guilt,

renounce it, which in turn leaves him castrated, feminised and victim to the return of

the father. Eventually, Berg appears to accomplish his task again yet, having
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experienced the return once before, the ambiguity remains and a potential second

return is foreseen in “a piece of wood, five foot by seven” (168) in the closing lines. The

essential structural metaphor that holds the narrative together is that of the ocean. It is

of this ocean that Berg asks “oblivion where are you?” (156), seeing in it a desirable

abjection, yet each time he casts in the “killed” father it returns on the tide. Unlike

Sophocles’ Oedipus, Berg actively pursues the death of his father – as Quin pursues

“evil” – yet the laws that structure society are seen to eternally return regardless of

intention. Narratively, the message of Berg is the same that we see throughout the

“permissive society”, that which is the central defence of the Oz Trial; formal

prohibition is redundant in the face of the “natural” limits that society realises for itself.

The police never physically appear in Berg as the internal logic of the narrative is

enough to rectify any transgressions. Here is the logic of repressive desublimation.

3.4: Experimental Theatre; Being and Happening

In considering the writing of Ann Quin in its historical context – relaxed censorship, the

“permissive society”, and the explosion of experimental theatre – it is essential to take

note of her publisher, John Calder. Described in a fiftieth anniversary festschrift, Paul

Harris describes Calder as one of the last “Gentleman Publishers. They may not all have

exactly been gentlemen but they were characters… utterly devoted to the call of the

struggle into print… all were from a mould now broken” (119). Indeed, the very fact

that Quin only found a publisher in Calder locates her at the centre of the debates

around censorship and the role of literature as the Calder name, as well as having

published the most living nobel prize winners of any publishing house, was at the

forefront of this “struggle into print”. As a staunch liberal, John Calder appears to have

shared the libertarian beliefs of the Oz editorial team from the beginning, if not their

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taste; he considering a “civilised man” to be one who is “tolerant, liberal with a small ‘l’,

and unshockable” (“The Novel”, 41). His career in publishing began by printing

American authors blacklisted in their homeland during McCarthyism. “I sometimes

wondered in those days why publishers of crime fiction were not prosecuted for

advocating murder” (88), he recalled in his 2001 memoir, Pursuit. From this, Calder

went on to take over Better Books, a London bookshop, which “before the 60s changed

all the rules… was the only London West End bookshop that held readings and literary

activities” (Herbert, 127). These readings and “literary activities” would become central

to a London literary scene and form a major point of connection between experimental

theatre, performance art, poetry and novelists. Calder’s tireless attempts to bring the

nouveau roman to Britain by publishing translations and hosting visiting writers would

lay the foundation for a number of cross-cultural inspirations and friendships – not

least introducing William Burroughs to Jean Genet, and Ann Quin to Nathalie Sarraute.

As part of “the Calder Group”, Quin would travel in circles much larger than

simply those contracted to John Calder’s publishing companies. In his memoir, Calder

recalls how these “other writers not published by me, but who moved in the same

circle, included Eva Figes and B.S. Johnstone [sic]” and he “would sometimes include

them with my own writers, especially Eva” (274) when it came to readings and

events.32 A testament to Calder’s genuine enthusiasm can be seen in his willingness to

continue booking Figes for readings after she refused him publishing rights to both

Tragedy and Social Evolution and her bestselling Patriarchal Attitudes. By the

publication of Tripticks, Quin was sharing the celebration of her publishing with Burns’
32
In spite of writing numerous times and at quite reasonable depth about his appreciation of B.S.
Johnson and his work, Calder never quite manages to get the spelling of his name correct throughout
Pursuit (2001). This is perhaps a case of Calder’s hard-line stance towards presenting his memoirs
“uncensored” leading him to refuse an editor as well. The same eccentric spelling also appears in
Calder’s introduction to The Nouveau Roman Reader (1986), suggesting he went at least twenty years
without being corrected.

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Dreamerika!, to which Johnson was invited (Calder and Boyars, “Invitation”). For

experimental writers, it appears that the Calder name and those associated with it

were at the centre of the newly emerging anti-Establishment literary life in Britain. The

“avant garde” that Calder cultivated received further attention through the many

literary events that he held. “There are endless newspaper cuttings from the Sixties

and Seventies about the high-voltage literary festivals he organised at Edinburgh and

elsewhere,” writes Bill Webb, “including inevitably the ‘happening’ involving the

trundling of a naked beauty through the hall in a wheelbarrow” (64). Remembered by

Calder as the first “happening” in Britain, this calculated disruption of Calder’s

Edinburgh Writer’s Conference in 1962 demonstrates the cultural influences travelling

between America, Continental Europe and Britain at the time – at least within

experimental circles. Such a series of networks clearly influences the development of

Quin’s writing over time; from the Brighton of Berg, she then writes of Greece in

Passages and finally of America in Tripticks – her style progressing in each.

In spite of the Calder Group’s considerable influence, however, it would be too

limited a view simply to take Ann Quin’s publishing house as the limit-point of her

experience as a writer. The young, working class Quin – although clearly producing

writing which would validate her presence in the company of the other Calder writers –

is nevertheless slightly out of place in such an upper-middle class, largely middle-aged

world. Calder’s own understanding and appreciation of Quin’s work is hugely

paternalist in tone and, as a result, tends towards a rather one-dimensional stock

reading. Berg, for example, is described as featuring a father-figure “(really a portrait of

the author’s father)” and a conclusion in which “the body of the older man is washed

up by the tide, prescient of what, in a short time, would happen to the author herself”

(272). It is, however, highly indicative of the new possibilities of the “permissive
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society” that the opera-loving Calder happily existed in overlapping cultural circles with

groups like the revolutionary Yippies and radical theatre experiments such as Jeff

Nuttall’s “The People Show”. The situation of Quin, coexisting within both the

modernist avant garde and the new radicalism, suggests the unique quality of her work

which lies in both its undeniable experimentalism and its unflinching candidness. The

philosophy and consciousness of the “permissive society” are seen appearing across

realms of culture previously considered separate. Quin’s unique approach to public

reading, for example – already described in the opening sections of this thesis –

demonstrates considerable countercultural influence;

[She] did her Quin thing, that is to say she came onto the stage and she just sat
and looked at people, she wouldn’t say a goddam word! She just stared, she
either implied or she actually stated that we sort of ‘think-communicate’, we
can communicate more in silence than with someone actually putting the
words across: which I was really quite intrigued by… whereas Bryan was simply
pissed off (405)

Against the traditional notion of “reading”, it could be seen that Quin was cutting to

the abject core of her writing by representing it in silence. The mix of reactions from

Burns and Johnson too suggest the kind of forced-response that could be expected of

the contemporary underground theatre movement; react how you will, as long as you

react. New forms of expression and an increasing fluidity between different mediums

allow radical ideas to circulate at an exponentially growing rate – a concept at the core

of the “permissive society” as an idea and evocatively expressed in confrontational

theatrical “happenings”.

The growth of “underground theatre”, or “the Fringe” is described in Peter

Ansorge’s 1975 book Disrupting the Spectacle in terms which, taken in the context of

censorship and set against the rise of the Calder Group, position it at the zenith of

popular Sixties experimental aesthetic and at the cutting edge of a radical “anti-

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Establishment” culture. Introducing it with the context of May 1968 in Paris, Ansorge

sees Jim Haynes’ “experimental Arts Lab” as “a remarkable shop window on a new

theatrical phenomenon – the underground” which “created a nationwide circuit of arts

labs, campuses and youth clubs” producing “highly individual wares to young and

enthusiastic audiences” (1). The success of such productions led to Arts Council

involvement, “however reluctantly”, and “between 1968 and 1973 they played as vital

a part in the life of our subsidised theatre as the Royal Court National or the Royal

Shakespeare Company” (1). Of this movement, the “characteristic form that

experimental theatre took… was that of the ‘happening’”, according to Schiele; “this

type of event, often interrupting another, challenged an audience’s preconceptions

about the nature of theatre. The audience was provoked into playing a positive role”

(194). Jeff Nuttall, one of the leading proponents of “happenings” with his troupe, The

People Show, described the type of agitational, interactive theatre as lying between

“demonstration [and] personal therapy. Frequently a savagery that began as satire…

changed midway to sadistic participation on the part of the artist” (129). The

boundaries of theatre were opening up into lived space and, as a result, moving from a

performance to an event.

The underlying principle of the “underground theatre” movement, from

Ansorge’s perspective, lay in the development of Artaudian concepts along directly

radical lines. The “body as a supersensitive instrument of expression” was aligned with

Marcuse-inspired demands for a non-repressive culture by framing “the text” – that

being written language – as “a disguised tool of repression” (26). For Quin, who “before

becoming a writer… aspired to work in the theatre” but failed her audition for RADA by

having “such nerves that she couldn’t go through with it” (Gordon, “Reading…”), such a

movement would present a definite source of inspiration. Such “happenings” and the
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“arts labs” that birthed them regularly occurred between readings at Calder’s Better

Books, presenting a shared context for the Calder Group and the underground to trade

influences.

By drawing on Quin’s early theatrical aspirations in a more direct manner, we

can begin to see reflections of a developing non-verbal theatre framing much of her

writing. Other than Berg which draws on an inversion of Oedipus for its narrative, it has

been often commented upon by critics and reviewers that Quin’s novels lack a distinct

narrative line. The manner in which this is usually approached tends towards ideas of

impressionism or else a formal experiment in opposition to the novelistic tradition.

Once these elements are considered matters of style (as was done earlier) then a closer

inspection of narrative framing indicates distinct character relationships in the manner

of a small-cast play. Three stands as the clearest example here. The narrative is

experienced through Quin’s immersive, abject style, as it is framed between the three

characters of Ruth, Leonard and “S”. The situation at times results in an inauthentic

bourgeois performance, such as when the characters sit at the dinner table and are

“fussed at as a child with new dolls, [Ruth] making sure each of us sat in appropriate

places” whilst Leonard “dedicated himself to the moment, person, subject” (57). At

other times, especially during the tape-transcript sections, the situation is evoked with

increasing abstraction; at one point even geometrically: “three points A B and C on a

rigid body in a straight line… variations endless” (21). The ability for an abject style to

invert or else render arbitrary the usually ideologically conservative functioning of

narrative would invite us to draw direct parallels between Quin’s novels and the

experimental practice of the underground theatre. Both move from staged

performance to direct experience and, in doing so, both seek to undermine the

reproduction of repressive forms of life.

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 As well as a shared context and aesthetic-ideological effect, experimental

theatre and “happenings” can be implied as having an increasingly influential effect

upon Quin’s writing, most especially as she is adopting American culture in Tripticks. As

well as descriptions of “New Age” approaches to culture such as “the workshops

[where] our aim is to stop the cortical chatter and open the flow of existence. Lose

your mind, and come to your senses” (165), Quin’s flights into imagery and metaphor

take a notable turn towards the subject matter of the underground. In a section

beginning with the Burroughsian image of “an unutterable tacky gaggle of bathos-

laden drag queens at an impoverished homemade ball” (127), Quin (in the guise of her

male, private-eye protagonist) goes on to describe how “homosexuality,

heterosexuality and asexuality all merge into one broad spoof of religious sentiment…

an unprecedented freedom, but a freedom only to switch channels: AC/DC”. This is

followed by a “sketch” (to use the comic theatre term) about the moon landings; “two

earthlings representing both sexes (though they are men) all races (though they are

pinkish-white beneath their space suits) and all nations (though they are from the

United States)… How far, after all, is the moon from earth? Precisely the same distance

as Vietnam” (127). Quin’s voice becomes notably different in Tripticks and takes of the

trappings of the American counterculture in the same manner as many British Fringe

troupes and a large amount of the British underground press. The culture of the

“happening” can be seen to move from Debord’s framing of a “situationist” culture in

which “the suppression and the realisation of art are inseparable aspects of a single

supersession of art” (191), through the American formulations evoked in Jerry Rubin’s

vision of “millions of young people [surging] into the streets of every city, dancing,

singing, smoking pot, fucking in the streets, tripping, burning draft cards, stopping

traffic” (253) and resulting in a revolutionary image of the “permissive society” as the

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ultimate expression of countercultural rebellion. In many ways the latent influences of

theatre and abjection that run through Quin’s writing find their fullest expression in

American alienation. The liberating force of such expression, however, can also be read

as undermining much of the essential “Britishness” of Quin’s writing. Such a stylistic

shift demonstrates a possible future trajectory of Quin’s writing into a Kathy Acker-

esque writing of grotesquery and postmodern excess, although the return to more

traditional form in “The Unmapped Country” – her final unfinished novel – might

suggest otherwise.33

John Calder describes one of Quin’s last American journeys – that one which

resulted in Tripticks – as part of an overall chaotic pattern which, at least from his

vantage point in 2001, represents the sort of limits to which his permissive liberalism

could be pushed. Funded by a D.H. Lawrence Fellowship, and then the Harkness

Commonwealth Fellowship, Quin journeyed America spending “much time with

hippies, was drinking too much and had experimented with a number of drugs” (272).

From Calder’s perspective this journey marked the beginning of the end. Winning “an

Arts Council grant of £2,000”, Quin flew to Dublin, then Amsterdam, “and no more was

heard of her until, in mid-winter, she was rescued, half-frozen from a snow-drift in

Stockholm” (272). The lithium treatment which attempted to restore her health left her

unable to write, manic-depressive and essentially posed the main chemical factor in

her suicide. Quin’s story, presented by Calder as a “wasted talent” parable about the

dangers of drugs and hippies, fits neatly into the popular mythical narrative of the

“permissive society”; working class person makes good, creates great art, goes too far

and dies. The imposition of this kind of retrospective narrative, however, fails to do

33
At the time of writing, Giles Gordon’s introduction preceding “The Unmapped Country” in Beyond the
Words constitutes the evidence that it was Quin’s final piece of writing. Further research into primary
sources would be necessary to either contradict or fully validate his statement.

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justice to the kinds of contextual intersections which present the American situation as

a form of solution to the concerns addressed throughout Quin’s prior work. The kind of

hyperconsumption that Quin engages in on her American journey seems to symbolise

the way many undercurrents of the “permissive society” were recuperated by late

capitalism.

Looking at Quin’s letters from the time, the “experimenting with drugs” Calder

describes can be seen to function as a shortcut to the kind of saturated, abject

perspective so indicative of her style;

I’m finding in the last oh what six months perhaps that I seem to be living
within a closed form, and wanting v. much an open one: that total attention and
being receptive that I learned on that peyote trip last year – that ‘magic’ just
don’t seem there anymore, and I know damn well the more I force it the more
it disappears. How to regain that, that kind of awareness, that kind of centre?
Maybe I need another peyote trip? Aie aie! Maybe living in London doesn’t
contribute to that, it is a very ‘closed in’ place to live. (letter to Larry Goodell)

The performative bourgeois social structures which the “permissive society” marks out

as repressive, and “happenings” aim to disrupt, is here totalised into a “closed in” state

of being which peyote collapses through the psychedelic experience of hyper-

receptiveness. Rather than a situationist “supersession of art”, however, chemically

altered states lack a social element and, as a consumable commodity, entail the

insatiability of desire that Marcuse identifies with the post-authoritarian mode of

repression. The poverty of expression associated with the vocabulary of the drug scene

– “closed” or “open”, “magic” – demonstrates an attempt to communicate the

Artuadian meaning between the words but, as a similar feeling can be conveyed

through consuming a commodity, the necessity for accuracy no longer exists. 34

34
The separation of lived life experiences from their material consequences that the drug experience
imbues is interestingly mirrored in Quin’s contribution to J.G. Ballard’s literary magazine, Ambit. “Dr
[Martin] Bax and I ran a competition… for the best prose or poetry written under the influence of drugs…
the best of all the writing was done by Ann Quin, under the influence of the contraceptive pill” (Frick).
Quin’s framing of the Pill as something belonging with LSD, marijuana and amphetamines as part of the

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 The pure receptivity of the psychedelic experience equates not only to

consumption on the chemical and material levels, but also on the level of signification.

As an extension of perception, the drugged space is a non-literary environment; it

favours the direct sensation over the act of interpretation. The abject subject is made

malleable by perpetual consumption. It is perhaps for this reason that Quin reports

that “diversions seem mainly the movies, and well they are good, but become a drag

when one wants to really move into/out of oneself” (letter). The language of the

cinema and the comic strip overtakes Quin’s writing in Tripticks. From the pulp-genre

image of the private eye that meets the reader on the first page with stock film-noir

lines – “I have many names. Many faces.” – to his road-trip journey following “my No. 1

X-wife and her schoolboy gigolo” (7), the narrative is a pastiche of commercial genres

from pop culture mediums. The language too expresses such influences; “there I was

feeling fat and happy in the middle of the road and then blap whamp whamp whomp

sok thud whak zapp whock thud bam zowie I got pushed on all sides” (66). Just as the

theatrical form was challenged through experimental theatre and happenings in the

1960s and appearing in Quin’s writing like Three, we now have the language of cinema

and the visual, moving image, adopted by comics ending up in Quin’s early 1970s

novels. The difference in application, however, is considerable. Where theatre forms a

living element of Quin’s overall narrative structure, the language of the image is

adopted as pastiche. The postmodern approach which celebrates using “someone

else’s words” if they are used in a different manner to their original intention poses, for

the first time in Quin’s writing, a level of distance from what appears on the page. As

the novel closes we are presented with the image of “earth moving out into the world.

I opened my mouth, but no words. Only the words of others I saw, like ads, texts,

“drug culture” has interesting repercussions for the rest of her writing.

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psalms, from those who had attempted to persuade me into their systems” (192). The

experimental striving towards a direct experience of life finds its apotheosis in the total

immersion of the cinema screen. Where stylistically, the desublimated being was

conveyed by embedding the entire situation with consciousness, crossing subjectivities,

the mass communications of Tripticks incorporate the subject in the global language of

Hollywood media. Before Baudrillard, Quin demonstrates the mystical qualities of late

capitalist hyperrealism yet, in an even more prescient manoeuvre, she identifies the

historical genesis of hyperreal Being not in mainstream media but in the immersive,

ecstatic imperative of the counterculture.

In terms of the trajectory of Ann Quin as a writer, Tripticks can on first glance

appear out of place – after three increasingly poetic, fragmented studies of abjection,

an American postmodern novel – yet in terms of the trajectory of the “permissive

society” (and the mythical “Sixties” in general) it is suitably fitting. Dreamerika!, the

Alan Burns novel Tripticks shared a publication-date party with, also looks to the U.S. as

a symbol of a hegemonic culture recuperating previously revolutionary ideas. Like Alan

Burns or Christine Brooke-Rose, it may have been that Ann Quin would take a break

from writing and return years later as a fully-fledged postmodernist. However, it will be

B.S. Johnson that remains the writer with whom she is most often connected when she

is written about, if only because the two committed suicide within a month of each

other. For Jonathan Coe, “Quin – like [Johnson] – refused to ‘live by illusion’. Better to

end your life altogether than to live it dishonestly” (372). A fellow working class writer

working on experimental novels, Quin represents a certain proletarian authenticity if

considered as a close compatriot of B.S. Johnson. Calder too compared them – wanting

to ration Quin’s grant money as a wage, just as Johnson wished for himself – as he

considered that, regarding both of their suicides, “the Arts Council must be considered
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at least partly responsible for” (276). For paternalistic Calder, the two represent a

beautiful yet flawed experiment when, for a brief moment in post-war Britain, working

class people were at the absolute cutting edge of high art. The suggestion is that, taken

better care of, both would have continued writing experimental novels unabated. With

the economic prosperity of the Sixties collapsing about them, however, and taking with

it the foundations upon which such experimental writing was built, any such a

“movement” would undoubtedly share the fate of the “permissive society”; its

commercially saleable assets stripped and the revolutionary ideals quashed by a

backlash. In a way the suicides of Ann Quin and B.S. Johnson present a dramatic full-

stop at the end of this unique period of British literary history, although to ascribe

anything more to them than simply an unhappy accident of timing would be to

overstate a case. Standing alone, Quin’s four novels represent some of the most

revolutionary writing of the Sixties, simultaneously evocative of the experimental

atmosphere of the period and of on-going relevance for writing today.

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Chapter 6: “Disembodied Voiceless Logos”: Recuperating the Radical in Christine
Brooke-Rose

6.1: Critical Understanding of Christine Brooke-Rose

For the past twenty years in British literary criticism Christine Brooke-Rose has come to

be “widely recognised as one of Britain’s most innovative contemporary writers” (2);

that quotation coming from Sarah Birch’s 1994 monograph Christine Brooke-Rose and

Contemporary Fiction – a book which itself has inspired many interesting recent

analyses. Like the other experimental writers covered in this study, however, Brooke-

Rose has a tendency to defy the imposed critical categories through which non-

traditional novels are engaged. The most commonly applied category is perhaps that of

the “postmodern”; a term embraced by Brooke-Rose herself during her later novels

and thus seemingly validated and projected back upon her earlier works. Unlike the

other writers covered here, Brooke-Rose also had a considerable career in criticism and

her knowledge of theory informs her fictions. Perhaps because of her theoretical

iconoclasm the small-but-growing area of Brooke-Rose studies tends away from

contextual analysis.

As a writer of literary fiction, criticism and non-fiction about literary fiction,

Brooke-Rose automatically occupies an uncomfortable space for the academic. Theory,

having pretences to some form of universality, is ostensibly positioned as objective,

whilst novels are engaged with as productions of writers, eras, cultures, or traditions

depending on the critic’s (theoretical) approach. To conduct thorough research the

Brooke-Rose scholar must inevitably relate her theory to her novels – a certain

“difficulty” that Richard Martin describes in terms of “the inevitable gap between

intention and reception” (43). As a result, the qualities of theory and text become

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entangled and a certain return to the author-as-meaning occurs, albeit somewhat

ironically through Brooke-Rose’s poststructuralism. A similar uncertainty is visible in the

way in which critics engage with B.S. Johnson’s notion of “truth” yet, as Glyn White

writes, “Johnson makes a conspicuous target and perhaps it is not surprising that

hostile critics prefer to attack the perceived experimentalist position in the person or

work of Johnson [as] Brooke-Rose and her novels are much more elusive” (Reading the

Graphic Surface, 121). To understand the works of Brooke-Rose demands a confidence

and theoretical nuance in works intimidating both for their complexity and exclusivity.

Brooke-Rose’s attitudes to her own work vary throughout her long career with

only a handful of disparate elements remaining constant. In her collected “last essays”,

Invisible Author, she complains that she is “always called a cerebral writer, which is

rather strange , because in most of my novels I’m inside somebody or other and invent

as I go, just registering what they see, hear, smell, taste, feel , and sometimes its

physical, sometimes not, according to the character” (172). Her confidence is placed in

a certain attitude to mimesis that justifies experimentalism as more “real” than

realism. It is perhaps for this reason that her four earliest novels (The Languages of

Love, The Sycamore Tree, The Dear Deceit, and The Middlemen) are largely disowned

after the publication of her first experimental novel, Out, and their titles eventually

disappear from her bio together: she introduces herself in 1991’s Stories, Theories and

Things as “author of Out, Such, and earlier novels” (6) whilst Carcanet’s 2006 Omnibus

covers them under her job description as “a freelance reviewer and writer during the

1950s and 1960s” (1). During her career as a writer she is constantly committed to

formal experiment in a way that Figes, Brophy, Burns and the other surviving writers

were not, even to the point of embracing the title “experimental” (Boswell).

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 In terms of titles, she writes of herself in Stories, Theories and Things as

someone who “has a knack of somehow escaping most would-be canonic networks”;

going on to list the half-stuck labels of “nouveau roman in English, nouveau nouveau…

Postmodern… Experimental… included in the SF Encyclopaedia… automatically coming

under Women Writers (British, Contemporary) [and] sometimes of interest to the

feminists”, whilst all along she is “fairly regularly omitted from the ‘canonic’ surveys…

that come under these or indeed other labels” (4). To the extent that she is addressed

critically, it would seem that attempts to engage with Brooke-Rose on any terms but

her own have been doomed to fall short of a final categorisation that would have

allowed her to reside within a secure and recognised critical “canon”. Indeed, there is a

sense that the most successful labels applied to her have performed the opposite

function. In an interview with Friedman and Fuchs she describes how the label

“nouveau roman in English” tends to be used as “from the English point of view [the

idea] is safely dead and no one talks about it anymore. In other words, all one is

capable of as a woman is to do what the men do, and not so well” (29). Brooke-Rose

recognises that she is doubly-cursed by being experimental and a woman writer within

Britain’s conservative literary culture. The defenders of Brooke-Rose’s writing invariably

study her as an individual writer exiled from the larger critical consensus.

In what sense then, can Brooke-Rose be characterised by the title of

“experimental”? In the review of her career with Friedman and Fuchs she is directly

faced with the term and responds in a fashion suggestive of the definition taken in this

thesis. The “experiment is really not knowing where you’re going and discovering”, she

writes, suggesting a sense of progression without necessarily any theoretical approach

as a guide. Equally whilst “experimenting with language, experimenting with form and

discovering things… sometimes you might get it wrong and it just doesn’t come off”
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(31). As with Johnson, there is an admission of potential failure present within the

concept of “experiment”, yet no more so than the average writing – the importance of

the task lies more in “discovering things”, uncovering and revealing new and more

potent forms for the contemporary novel to take.

In spite of similarities in approach, however, Brooke-Rose critically remains a

distinct entity to Johnson. In a very late interview for the Independent on Sunday, she

herself goes as far as suggesting that Johnson “was not an experimental writer. His

stories belong to the then fashionable drab social realism” (Boncza-Tomaszenki, 28).

Admittedly, this response may be due to exasperation with a life-long comparison

between her work and Johnson’s often made by the non-academic press without

particular nuance. It does, however, mark out the boundary lines by which Brooke-Rose

can be measured against other experimental writers and measure them equally in

return. The clear distaste Brooke-Rose has for social realism – most notably the “drab”

world it seeks to portray – is reflected in many of the critical attitudes surrounding her

work; most especially later reviews written after the popularisation of postmodernism

and the kind of text-about-text that Brooke-Rose is later known for. Judy Little

describes Brooke-Rose’s experimentalism in terms of “someone who explores language

itself (rather than sociological or psychological issues)” (122); an approach that makes

her texts resemble “appositional amalgamations or constellations” that are “not open

readily to a reading that searches for opposition and difference” (130). Unlike Johnson,

whose texts are more and more often read as reflections of the post-war era through

an experimental lens, Brooke-Rose is almost universally treated as a pure embodiment

of the experimental lens itself. It is this fantasy of the absolutely self-sustaining text

free of cultural influences (outside of the fact that it renders them insignificant) that,

fairly or unfairly, comes to define Brooke-Rose’s work.

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 However, by taking this ideological construction not as a self-perpetuating

metanarrative about language and discourse but engaging with it as a product of the

historical intellectual climate we can reopen a route into Brooke-Rose’s works that the

theoretical implications of the works themselves would seem to close. In all accounts

of Brooke-Rose’s life, for instance, the central emphasis is placed upon her cross-

continental origins and subsequent “outsider” status in both France and Britain. From

this theoretical points are made, such as Reyes’ description of her bearing “a

continually shifting and very individual relationship to the cultural contexts in which

she works” (58). The strength of this truism lies in its defence of Christine Brooke-Rose

as a writer of considerable independent merit, yet it also closes down much discussion

of context and influence. Indeed, outside of reducing Brooke-Rose to “the nouveau

roman in English”, a translator of a foreign culture, there is assumed to remain only the

position of the pure original free of all influence but their own genius. In reality,

Brooke-Rose belonged both to the literary press in London, having regular columns in

both The Guardian and The Spectator, and later was part of academic circles in Paris

thanks to her Professorship at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes. Although she was

often uncomfortable within these circles and consciously placed herself on the

margins, the aspect of influence and context cannot simply be ignored.

Clearly evident in Brooke-Rose’s work, novelistically, academically and

journalistically, is the influence of the nouveau roman: described by Nadeau as “the

refusal of certain novel forms – [psychological, action] – and their replacement by a

narrative that was concerned less with the conventions of genres than the particular

reality demanding expression” (127). Yet within the “particular reality” that British

reviewers such as Anthony Burgess wrote – his articles in The Yorkshire Post regularly

singing the praises of British experimental writing – the works of Robbe-Grillet and
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Nathalie Sarraute carry none of the “connotations of protest, the breaking down of

worn images, the flying of violent flags”, but rather seem “in favour of stasis rather

than dynamism, death instead of life” (“Characters in Orbit”, 4). Sandwiched between

the “elitist experimentalism of modernism, and the foreignness of the nouveau roman”

(Tew, 38), it would be inaccurate to position Brooke-Rose’s work, or that of any British

experimental novelist, as instead caught between a conservative British literary culture

and a critically involved French one. Brooke-Rose wrote for a British audience and

received awards for doing so; to attribute this to her capacity to predict that

poststructuralist theory would become the dominant theoretical framework of

postmodernism’s material conditions would be as overly generous an analysis as

“nouveau roman in English” is a reductive one.

In short, many of the positions which surround Brooke-Rose’s work critically can

be demonstrated in Brian McHale’s postmodernist analysis of her works in the

collection Utterly Other Discourse. Taking the chronological and stylistic breaks

between The Middlemen and Out, and Thru and Amalgamemnon, McHale posits “two,

and now perhaps three, distinct careers as a novelist” (195). 35 The period constituting

Out, Such, Between, and Thru marks the beginning of her “hesitancy” and, therefore,

her postmodernism; something that only truly flowers in the novels after

Amalgamemnon. Regardless of whether the writing of such daring experimental fiction

without precedent in Britain could be called “hesitant”, McHale’s real critical fallacy is

the attribution of later postmodernism to earlier experimentalism: essentially

suggesting that the four novels Brooke-Rose wrote between 1964 and 1975 existed

without meaning until later critical engagements were made possible. Operatively, this

35
Interestingly, this is something Brooke-Rose herself picks up on later, see “Remaking”.

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is a theory-first model of analysis conducted more for the benefit of McHale’s notions

about postmodernism than a real attempt to explain a text.

In approaching Brooke-Rose I intend to answer McHale’s categorisations by

considering the “second career” of four novels as “experimental”, to be differentiated

from the later “postmodern” novels by merit of both their historical positioning as

texts and the cultural context within which they appeared. The “postmodern” Brooke-

Rose who can all-too-knowingly write in 1981’s Rhetoric of The Unreal, “that this

century is undergoing a reality crisis has become a banality, easily and pragmatically

shrugged off” (3), is in truth a product of developments materially and ideologically

within twentieth-century Europe that would be better thought of as one result of the

earlier period’s potential, rather than a fatalist’s explanation of a radicalism that now

appears “naïve”. It is my contention that this state of affairs was brought about in line

with a much larger cultural trend – the recuperation of the radical theories of May ’68

into neoliberal late capitalism. Such a perspective draws upon an increasingly popular

cultural materialist reading of the cultural phenomenon known as “postmodernism”,

yet it is through a concentration upon the historical details of Brooke-Rose’s own

experiences that the divide between her Sixties novels and her later works appears.

6.2: May ’68 and the Postmodern

In his recent publication, The Communist Hypothesis, Alain Badiou begins his analysis of

the contemporary situation in the West with a stark message that “the real outcome

and the real hero of ’68 is unfettered neo-liberal capitalism” (44). As an active thinker

during that revolutionary moment who continues to sing its praises he is clearly not
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speaking lightly when he says that “the libertarian ideas of ’68, the transformation of

the way we live, the individualism and the taste for joiussance have become a reality

thanks to post-modern capitalism and its garish world of all sorts of consumerism”

(44). Arguably this may be a veteran “‘68er” overstating the relevance of the protests,

yet this type of reasoning is not unique to Parisian thinkers. Indeed, the relationship

between late capitalist modes of production and the theoretical traditions that became

known as post-structuralism and postmodernism has become a topic of keen interest

to many contemporary thinkers, Marxist or otherwise.

Much of this thought stems from Jameson’s work Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and its linking of “forms of transnational business…
new international division of labour… new forms of media interrelationship, computers
and automation” with what he describes as “familiar social consequences, including
the crisis of traditional labour, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now
global scale” (xix). The argument proceeds from the new theoretical models of
resistance popularised in the Sixties, widely categorised as opposition to overarching
power structures based around questions of identity and micro-politics, to a
comparison with a neoliberal mode of capitalism that equally desires the demise of
traditional power structures. The neoliberal model, however, acts not in the interests
of freeing the subject from bondage but rather frees capital from political regulation.
The logical conclusion of this argument is a critique of postmodernism and its related
aesthetics that sees in its self-referentiality and distrust of metanarratives a complicity
with the individualism that represents neoliberalism’s dominant ideological discourse.
Slavoj Žižek dramatizes the argument during his study of Deleuze in a short vignette
wherein a yuppie reads Deleuze’s What is Philosophy?, making enthusiastic
comparisons of “the communication of affective intensities” with the adverts he
designs, the “direct coupling [of] man to a machine” with his son’s Transformer toys
and “the need to reinvent oneself permanently, opening oneself up to a multitude of
desires” (183) with online virtual pornography. It is not a particularly convincing scene,
yet behind the exaggeration lies a persuasive linking of poststructuralist radicalism and
modern consumerism.

Other variants upon the direct comparison between postmodernism and late

capitalism have been made. For example, Simon Choat’s study of Marx Through Post-

Structuralism emphasises a distinction between theoretical poststructuralism and

“postmodernism in general” wherein “the post-structuralists did not succumb to the

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widespread anti-Marxism of the post-1968 years” (17); essentially keeping them

distinct from the characteristics perceived in an overarching postmodern trend.

Similarly, Raymond Williams’ later essays designate “avant-garde political positions…

dissident from fixed bourgeois forms, but still as bourgeois dissidents” (62) as a

category equally existent within modernism and pre-twentieth century cultural

formations; suggesting that the “’68” phenomenon is in no way unique in terms of

appropriated radicalism. These variants upon the overarching narrative seek to define

certain aspects of “genuinely radical” avant-gardism against a faux radicalism complicit

with hegemonic ideology. From this we could assume that certain texts will forever

resist absorption whilst others were either written naively, deceptively, or in some

other state of bad faith.

Against these arguments over decontextualised texts it would perhaps be better

to regard questions of radicalism in terms of particular cultural climates. If we assume

Jameson’s description of neo-liberalism – transnational capitalism premised on

technological advancements – to be at least a useful approximation of what

“postmodernity” entails, then arguably the historical premises of this argument post-

date the conception of many of Brooke-Rose’s experimental novels. Certainly it can be

argued that texts predating “postmodernity” contain typically “postmodern” aspects,

maybe even that these kernels direct the cultural climate towards what becomes

“postmodernism”, yet it would be somewhat revisionist to then position these texts in

direct equivalence with later, consciously postmodern works. Theoretically, the process

follows the Situationist idea of recuperation: as Guy Debord states, “dissatisfaction

itself [becomes] a commodity as soon as economic abundance could extend to the

processing of such raw materials” (59). The texts are “recuperated” into a canon a

posteriori in order for them to be sufficiently explained and reconciled with what

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Debord labelled the “spectacle”, but could equally be labelled hegemonic culture, or

critical consensus.

If poststructuralism’s recuperation into late capitalism through neoliberal

ideology is the theoretical process by which “postmodernism” results from “May ‘68”,

then such a process ought to be reflected in the historical evidence also. Kristin Ross’

2002 May ’68 and its Afterlives, argues that “the management of May’s memory – the

way in which the political dimensions of the event have been, for the most part,

dissolved or dissipated by commentary and interpretations – is now… at the centre of

the historical problem of 1968 itself” (1). In attempting to outline a historical picture of

what occurred during that fateful month and the years following, Ross highlights the

fact that even as it was occurring, every aspect involved consciously sought to define

the situation in their own terms. “May ‘68” as a term, she points out, erases the

memory of the Algerian war and the Parisian massacres of the early Sixties conducted

by fascist paramilitaries and police which served to radicalise many of those involved in

the late Sixties insurrection. Without this historical context, the “events” were typically

described by the left as a spontaneous unity of radical student and striking worker – a

unity that it was the objective of the Gaullist regime to break by denying its existence;

The overall aim Pompidou would sum up in a single sentence: ‘I wanted to treat
the problem of the youth separately’. After students had been dissociated from
strikers each group would settle back into the confines of their ‘sociological’
identity, and both would lose (69).

The definition of the situation was a fundamental part of the politics of the situation,

one which involved both sides with the media and its implied audience, the citizens of

France, the battleground. Arthur Marwick, in his account which attempts to dismiss

political statements altogether, reaches similar conclusions to Ross, albeit emphasising

that the unity was largely due to the police tendency to unleash equally excessive

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violence against both students and striking workers (606). In such a situation, where

the public was daily exposed to the visceral excesses of police and gendarmes on the

news, outspoken support for the state would itself be a form of extremist political

gesture. The stage was effectively set for poststructuralism’s political obsession with

communication and image.

In my paper “The Composition of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru: An Afterlife of

May ‘68” (2014) I outline Brooke-Rose’s entrance into the Paris turmoil in the latter

months of 1968 in order to take up a position in the newly formed University of Paris

VIII at Vincennes. Although an “experimental” university with a faculty dominated by

Communists and Gauchistes, the institution was nevertheless formed as part of the

Gaullist project of addressing students’ demands separately from the workers and, as a

result, the institution was not only politically volatile in terms of its own student base

but the campus also served as a regular target for outside far-left groups’ campaigns of

disruption and occupation. Long after the events of May ’68, Vincennes would continue

to be a hotbed of political radicalism – part of the process Ross describes in terms of

“traces of May’s thematics [continuing] to be played out…. above all in those pursuits

that engaged directly with the question of representation” (114). The linguistic fixation

upon “representation” – a homonym referring both to democratic political organisation

and to the mimetic intention of communication – would allow the debates of May to

enter academia where the financial support for extended political discussions arguably

created an echo chamber effect, artificially prolonging revolutionary insights long after

the revolutionary moment itself had passed. Looking back on her experiences of

Parisian intellectual culture from 1976, Brooke-Rose describes the prominence of

“language being analysed in Marxist terms of exchange and subversion, so that Sollers

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could tell me recently, with absolute conviction, that ‘nous avans fait le revolution’ [we

have made the revolution]” (“Ganging Up”, 26).

Brooke-Rose’s first years at Vincennes did not find her quite so blasé, however.

After a decade championing the experimental novel in a dismissive Britain, the

seriousness and vitality involved in French intellectual debate was a constant source of

anxiety. Early drafts of her anti-biography, Remake (in its initial incarnation as an actual

autobiography prior to libel-conscious editing), describe “the very first meeting I

attended, just before the University opened, [which] went on from ten in the morning

to eight, and I had never heard University teachers being so rude to each other” (235).

Her response was to adopt a militantly apolitical stance, refusing to become involved

on the grounds of her non-French nationality. Alongside the composition of Thru, she

also worked on what would become A ZBC of Ezra Pound; a study of Pound’s work,

largely the Cantos, which, as Barbara Hardy describes, is “brilliantly analytic and

empathetic, profoundly as well as superficially close to the experience of Pound in its

structures and languages”. That the majority of Brooke-Rose’s work and

correspondence at this time (held at the Harry Ransom Centre) involves Pound rather

than her other theoretical work or the writing of Thru suggests a certain willingness to

escape contemporary politics by delving into the esoteric.36 By 1973, her attitude to the

popular poststructuralists, by this point selling out any auditorium they chose to speak

in, was a suspicion that “it is all a beautiful, theoretical game, that they themselves

don’t perhaps believe in, but indulge in it as one indulges a passion”, labelling the

various systems as “the Levi-Strauss Palace, the Derrida Daedalus, the Lacan Labyrinth,

the Kristeva Construct, the Barthes Pavilion, the Planetarium showing the Sollers

System” (“Viewpoint”, 614). The Vincennes years mark Brooke-Rose’s introduction to

36
There are numerous references to Pound in Thru and the simultaneity of Brooke-Rose’s work would
suggest that its influence would merit further academic study.

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the then-radical discourses of poststructuralism, yet they also result in the disillusion,

detachment, and irony which later define postmodernism. Although not politically

radical herself, Brooke-Rose’s personal history places her in relation to the process of

recuperation as sketched by Badiou, Jameson, et al.

If this is the process by which Brooke-Rose is historically positioned to make her

own valuable contributions to both the theory and the literature of postmodernism, it

must be asked what existed prior to that stage, during the years she spent as an

experimental novelist in Britain. Brooke-Rose’s later statements concerning

“experimental” writing often engage with the term under the fuzzy rubric we have seen

employed in the introduction by studies such as The Routledge Companion to

Experimental Literature, complaining that “although I was of course labelled

‘experimental’ without further detail, my topics were seldom signalled as original”

(Invisible Author, 16) since “experimental” is considered to be its own genre. In her

contribution to Friedman and Fuchs’ Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental

Fiction, “Illiterations”, she suggests that there might be “trivial as well as truly

innovative experiment just as there can be trivial as well as important writing in wholly

familiar forms” (62). Uniquely among the other writers covered in this study, however,

Brooke-Rose celebrated the term “experimental” during the Sixties whilst it was still

largely a negative, marginalising term. In an interview with The Scotsman following the

publication of her first non-traditional novel, she said that “I prefer to call my novel,

Out, experimental” in preference to the offered term “anti-novel” (Boswell). Although

Brooke-Rose’s preference for “experimental” may be partly due to an aversion to being

known as a writer of “the nouveau roman in English”, a study of her statements and

journalistic work demonstrate a far more conscious framing of “experimental”. For

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Brooke-Rose, the term is intentional rather than merely adopted and emerges from a

distinct set of parameters.

Brooke-Rose’s framing of the term “experimental” shows itself most clearly in

her championing of the nouveau roman, although it in many ways pre-exists it. Her

discovery of the new style emerging from France could be dated to 1961 when she

reports upon a talk by the visiting trio of Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and

Nathalie Sarraute which “caused quite a tremor of excitement in literary circles”. For

Brooke-Rose, desirous to break away from the “too easy” social satires she was

currently writing, they represented an attempt “to save the novel from its

‘representational’ impasse” (“Vanishing Author”). By 1965, Brooke-Rose has herself

engaged with this “representational impasse” in the form of Out and, in writing again

of the nouveau roman in an essay for London Magazine entitled “Dynamic Gradient”,

outlines her framing of the problem as essentially scientific in nature,

We must evolve a new way of thinking and reject the old universalistic and
absolute concepts, especially our habit of identification, just as the scientists
have done. If we do not, we shall continue to produce more and more semantic
blockages in our nervous systems, more breakdowns in communication, more
mental disturbances, in fact we would not be equipped to survive the
evolutionary process. (1)

This is a long way from the later Brooke-Rose who is content to see innovation

occurring in “wholly familiar forms”, the Brooke-Rose of the Sixties considers radical

new engagements with form to be absolutely necessary “experiments” in “evolving a

language that corresponds structurally to what we know of empirical reality today. Not

yesterday. Not tomorrow” (5).

The imperative to revolutionise communication and perception through the

novel form is, according to a 1969 essay entitled “The Nouveau Roman”, tied directly to

“the revolution in physics, the breakthrough to a non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean way

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of thinking, which has indirectly affected semantics, philosophy and the arts. Only the

novel lags behind”. To truly come to terms with the counter-intuitive yet physically

verifiable theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the old mechanistic

presumptions of the Nineteenth Century Novel had to be reconsidered and new forms

developed in line with contemporary experience – a process which deservedly wears

the title of “experimental literature”. As a result, the mechanistic cause and effect of

standard narrative structure is challenged, stable characters exploded and the language

composing the text overflows the traditional barriers of style, content and form which

were developed in line with the Victorian’s empiricist project.

In pursuing this experimental, “scientific” project, Brooke-Rose engaged in

considerable research in psychology for Out and, for Such, filled a notebook with her

studies of up-to-date astronomical, cosmological and other physics-related research.

The underlying drive towards absolute contemporaneity and its assumed relevance to

the individual can be felt in the questions she asked and the intuitions that inspired

them. For example, three whole pages of notes involve the physics behind moon

landings and the associated Space Race. Not only does she note the “cosmic ray

particles” which pose a barrier to space travel, she also notes that because “most of

the electron spectrum [is] blocked atm” by the atmosphere’s shielding function, the

future of telescopes involves orbital satellites – a speculation which leads on to a series

of notes on Sputnik, correcting calculations due to relativity and a series of technical

terms many of which make their way in to Such itself. Not only contemporary in terms

of science-related current events, Brooke-Rose’s notes on cosmology begin to wander

into a postmodernist questioning of historical linearity (“appeal to cosmol. Theory –

inquiry as to extent to [which] past and future are predicted”), metanarratives (“[do]

present conceptions of physical laws have nothing to say? pass from physics to

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metaphysics, from astrology to theology”) and the sovereignty of the individual

(“corporate views of science merge into beliefs of individual”). By remaining true to

her scientific approach, however, Brooke-Rose works to understand the nuanced

answers to such questions and moves beyond the obscurantism which plagued later

popular-postmodernist discourse. As a result, Such incorporates conceptions of

relativity into its “experimental” development of multi-perspective characters and

battling discourses in a nuanced and complex manner.

That Brooke-Rose’s commitment to novelistic revolution through scientific

understanding eventually ebbed towards the end of the Sixties is no doubt in part due

to the general misunderstandings and indifference to her project; one reviewer

suggesting that “few of us except – or perhaps especially? – psychiatrists or physicists

could write it and fewer still could read it” (Cosh). Nevertheless, the terms under which

she framed “experimental” as a positive label remain and, arguably, ease her transition

into the French environment of poststructuralism. A review of Levi-Strauss’ work in The

Times on the 2nd March 1968, for example, she gave the subtitle “A New Multi-

Dimensional Way of Thinking”. Similarly, a book-length study of the nouveau roman

involving her conception of a “post-Euclidean” writing was only abandoned due to

concerns summarised in a letter from Eva Hesse; “what percentage of them will still be

heard of in ten or fifteen years from now?”. Brooke-Rose’s theoretical and literary

desire for experimental literature to push forward into the revolutionary world of the

“Now” is what simultaneously connects her to the other British experimental writers

seeking to bring literature out from under the shadow of the Nineteenth Century Novel

and represents the very energies which could be usefully recuperated into the

backward-facing self-referentiality of postmodernism. Surrounded by the often

incomprehensible political commitments abounding in Vincennes, Brooke-Rose’s

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commitment to experimenting with the novel form would benefit from adopting a

sense of irony in a manner that would not be possible in the stark political reality of

Seventies Britain. This Brooke-Rose transcends the label of Sixties British Experimental

Novelist, but that is not to say that during those years she was not caught in the same

radical currents as her experimental contemporaries.

6.3: The Experimental Novels of Brooke-Rose

Returning to Christine Brooke-Rose’s four experimental novels – Out, Such, Between,

and Thru – it is clear that we must now view them not in McHale’s “proto-postmodern”

context but, if we are to consider the later works recuperating earlier ideas, they

should more correctly be considered as a trajectory of British experimental writing in

the Sixties. The ideas developed within the novels and the modes of formal innovation

chosen to convey these ideas follow a logic of their own which remains distinct from

the arguments imposed upon them at a later stage by, among others, the author

herself. This is not to say, however, that this distinction is so stark as to isolate these

novels from each other; rather it allows us to more clearly distinguish the evolution of

Christine Brooke-Rose’s style on its own terms whilst also helping to draw connections

between Brooke-Rose and her contemporaries which have not been entirely apparent

using the current academic approach. A short chronological review of these novels is

therefore appropriate.

As described above, the network of geneses that inspires Brooke-Rose to move

from the style of social satire present in The Middlemen to the formal innovation of

Out can be linked together through her work in the publishing industry. Literary

journalism, criticism and the mode of academic discourse entering the early Sixties

become for her exhausted and with them her own writing; she later dismisses her early

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novels as indistinguishable from the other social satires of the period, totally lacking in

any sense of personal intellectual ownership. The Friedman and Fuchs interview sees

her describing them as “too easy. It was great fun, but it wasn’t what I wanted” (30).

Inspired by her introduction to the nouveau romanciers, and with the benefit of a

move away from Secker and Warburg into the more promising hands of Michael

Joseph, Brooke-Rose was in a position to undertake her move to experimental writing.

By 1964, Christine Brooke-Rose was in a position to produce Out, the first of what

would become her recognised canon; demonstrating many of the techniques that

would come to define the Brooke-Rose voice whilst breaking with the “easy” satirical

form almost totally.

The most initially palpable shift that takes place between the satirical and the

experimental styles is the role of narrative in contextualising the action of the novel.

Like many other of the experimental novels – most obviously works by Alan Burns and

Eva Figes – the traditional “narrative”, in terms of an overarching context or story, is

largely only alluded to in the text; the overt description of the novel as a “science-

fiction vision of a world surviving catastrophe” is saved for the blurb.37 This exclusion of

overt storytelling from the text stems from the naturalistic connection of all language

and description to character. For an example of the dramatic shift in style that writing

embedded in character creates, consider the first paragraph of Out:

A fly straddles another fly on the faded denim stretched over the knee. Sooner
or later, the knee will have to make a move, but now it is immobilised by the
two flies, the lower of which is so still that it seems dead. The fly on top is on
the contrary quite agitated, jerking tremendously, then convulsively, putting out
its left foreleg to whip, or maybe to stroke some sort of reaction out of the fly
37
Many of Brooke-Rose’s novels rely on this ability to “explain themselves” in the blurb, a technique later
justified by her work with OuLiPo, and often demanded by the publisher. A letter to Michael Schmidt of
Carcanet regarding Xorandor and part of a discussion on his recommendation that she remove all
personal pronouns from the text went as far as to suggest that although “it will be invisible, like my other
constraints… you can add it to the blurb if you like”.

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 beneath, which, however, remains so still that it seems dead. A microscope
might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy in its innumerable eyes, but only to the
human mind behind the microscope, and besides, the fetching and rigging up of
a microscope, if one were available, would interrupt the flies. Sooner or later
some such interruption will be inevitable; there will be an itch to scratch or a
nervous movement to make or even a bladder to go and empty. But now there
is only immobility. The fly on top is now perfectly still also. Sooner or later some
interruption will be necessary, a bowl of gruel to be eaten, for instance, or a
conversation to undergo. Sooner or later a bowl of gruel will be brought, unless
perhaps it has already been brought, and the time has come to go and get rid of
it, in which case – (11/12).

As a technical innovation, Brooke-Rose has here attempted to altogether remove the

distancing involved in narratorial free indirect discourse: something she later described

as a “subtle device for narrative information [that really] blurs and weakens it, exposing

it as a ‘mere’ device” and identifies it as being “instinctively” dropped by the nouveau

roman “without the flourish with which Robbe-Grillet disowned the past tense as the

mark of traditional narrative” (“Dissolution”, 189). Inspired by, and yet distinct from,

the style of the nouveau roman, Brooke-Rose’s commitment to presenting narrative

only through character shuns a sense of novelistic objectivism and the dictatorial

qualities associated with the authorial voice, even when it contains within the

character a commitment to thinking in the objective, the third-person. Out becomes a

patchwork of characters centring around a narrator whose own fixations shape the

narrative and thus our understanding of the character simultaneously.

The situation presented in the novel through the allusive style is in keeping with

Brooke-Rose’s desire to create a modern scientific novel both in form and content,

albeit in a fairly literal sense by drawing upon the conventions of the science-fiction

genre. A post-apocalyptic world premised on contemporary ecological fears – plague,

natural disaster – gives voice to both tensions about race – “colourless” people are now

the servants of characters like “Mrs. Mgulu” and “Mr. Swaminathan”, with slogans such

as “exalting all colours to the detriment of none” (125) representing the ideology of
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this new hegemonic power – whilst scientific terms are transformed in the head of the

former-scientist protagonist into obsessive compulsions to be repeated to the point of

meaninglessness. The “Labour Exchange” that provides the setting for large parts of

the novel positions these ideological discourses against the inhuman engines of

government bureaucracy. The driving force of the novel is largely how these tensions

surface in the character-centric descriptions of this fictional world. In a sense, the

language “games” taking place within this novel are merely indicators of shifted power

relations; power relations that, in the classic science-fiction tradition, are indicative as

much of contemporary society as the imagined world presented. 38

The world that Brooke-Rose portrays through her characters is therefore one of

fantasy significantly different from the approach of the nouveau romanciers that she

asserts provide her inspiration. In Maurice Nadeau’s 1967 study of The French Novel

Since the War the innovation of the French approach focuses upon “a scrupulously

drawn up inventory of what is perceived by our senses, of the world that exists outside

us: the pure world of the object, the world of the ‘thing-in-itself’” (129). In A Rhetoric

of the Unreal, Brooke-Rose can be seen to share this sense of the “thing-in-itself” being

imperative as “objects or elements in nature that stand for, or become points of

convergence for human emotions, are strictly a form of pathetic fallacy” (294) and so

removing any qualities inherently invested in such objects can be seen as a “cleansing

operation”. Certainly the stylistic implications of non-emotive description are present

within Out from the opening line where “a fly straddles another fly on the faded denim

stretched over the knee” (11). However, where the theoretical readings of this style

38
Although Brooke-Rose’s reversal of imperialist racial hierarchy (the “colourless” persecuted by people
of colour with the intention that “the irrationality of racism [be] laid bare” (Invisible Author, 17)) may
appear a little heavy-handed to the contemporary reader, the implication was in fact too subtle for one
reviewer in 1965 who suggested that “for us poor whites… this novel could be a clinical ‘1984’” (“New
Novels”).

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focus upon notions such as authenticity or objectivity – “thing-in-itself” a clear

reference to Heideggerian ontology – the situations that the character-led descriptions

portray are such that the lack of emotive connection becomes itself a central focus of

character. The novelistic urge towards creating a purer form of mimesis doesn’t find its

end here in formal innovations but in the questions such innovations raise about the

effects that characters’ world-views have upon their position within that world. The

passive observer of fly copulation, unemployed and awaiting gruel to eat, ruminates on

what “a microscope might perhaps reveal” (11) in a foreshadowing of the increasing

solipsism he will experience as part of a racially and economically alienated people.

Similarly, the linguistic shift towards technical language in Out – scientific,

bureaucratic, and otherwise – moves away from the dinner-party familiarity of The

Middlemen towards an impression of scientific objectivity and modernity. Yet this

change in register is not only a stylistic switch from satirical novel to experimental

novel, but also functions to bring a polyphony of discourses into the novel, all with

conflicting hierarchies. In The Middlemen the invasion of public relations jargon into a

dinner party is presented as highly gauche and the technicalities of estate agents and

property law exist only as an infuriating hindrance to the main characters’ bourgeois

sense of their entitlement to own property. For the satirical Brooke-Rose all forms of

language not associated with the “people like us” who are writing, reading and

appearing in her novel are presented as inferior, invasive and corrupt. The

experimental framework of Out places language central to the interaction of its

characters and, as such, their position within the society is presented in the very

linguistic construction of their consciousness.

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 A key phrase of Out that recurs numerous times through the main character’s

narration is that “a [scientific measurement device] might perhaps reveal [a potential

element of something being contemplated]”. From the first page where a “microscope

might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy” (11) the phrase is repeated with teinoscopes,

bronchoscopes, periscopes, and others for both comic effect and to reinforce the

alienation of the speaker. A similarly recurring phrase, “diagnosis always

prognosticates aetiology”, is used to conjure the medical hierarchy that the speaker, as

a potentially plague-carrying “colourless”, is both studied and denigrated by.

Interestingly, Brooke-Rose doesn’t relate this technique to the nouveau roman but

rather to her other major modern influence, Ezra Pound. The “subliminal structures” of

repetition apparent when “you use the same phrase in a new context” (Brooke-Rose,

Cohen and Hayman, 3) both change the phrase and the context. The language does not

remain independent, as such, but takes its meaning from the context; the

accumulation of such contexts that occurs during repetition invoking new reactions and

implications. Application of the same over-technical phrase in a different context can

thus conjure both bathos and sympathetic responses simultaneously.

It is the transference of language and meaning between contexts that

distinguishes Out as an experimental, rather than postmodern novel. The exploration

of terminology and fantasy worlds inverts contemporary social structures in a nuanced

manner indicative of Brooke-Rose’s concerns about power and its ideological

justification. Gone are the privileged speakers of the satirical novels and their narrative

preference afforded by free indirect discourse, yet the eye for character and the social

interactions that constitute it remain and are perhaps enhanced by the formal

innovations. Rather than the impersonal sparring of discourses that comes to define

much of Brooke-Rose’s later works, the development of language is here absolutely

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related to character and, as a result, becomes a mark of belonging or alienation.

Moving on from Out, Such moves further with this interrelationship of character and

language into conjuring an entirely internal world replete with its own sub-

characterisations and emotional resonances.

The story of Such, again most clearly visible through the blurb, is that of “a

three-minute heart massage”. Around this moment of death and resurrection

memories of the narrator’s life as a psychiatrist to theoretical physicists - whose work

makes them “tend to edge on the brink of madness” (257) – are intercut with a fantasy

world, or “unfinished unfinishable story”, featuring six imaginary children,

“Dippermouth, Gut Bucket Blues, my sweet Potato Head, Tin Roof, Really [and]

Something” (390). The inclusion of scientists allows Brooke-Rose to again include

technical language, yet unlike Out the technical language, taken from in-depth

research, is not used here as an exclusive discourse but as a means of evoking

increasingly metaphorical imagery regarding psychological states. From the “kind of

space” (224) the character’s mind moved through in death, to the “psychotic

handwriting of distant nebulae…beyond the visual range” (224) and the “weird

geometry of human nature” (256), Such collapses distinctions between the counter-

intuitive complexities of modern scientific understanding and the human mind that

seeks to understand. The repeated phrase “physician, heal thyself” (269) – as well as

the speaker’s self-description as “Mister Lazarus” (223) – draw out with Biblical themes

a metaphysical sense of unity between cosmology and psychology whilst

simultaneously implying the “psychotic” qualities of such ruminations in the excessively

metaphorical nature of the language.

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 Set against the “real-life” characters of the protagonist’s memory (whose

presence is intertwined with technical metaphors) is the fantasy space. Where the

cheating wife, respectable academic patriarch, and wearying journalists could be

considered part of the stock of archetypical characters that inhabit British “literary”

fiction, the menagerie that the protagonist meets in the fantasy space evokes pop-

genres; the “girl-spy” (235), “white monk” (289), the “cigar shaped vehicle” (214) that

“travels supersonic” (216) – all combine and move between the “children” characters

in a pastiche of comics, Carrollian nonsense, and pulp sci-fi. Writing in 1986 about “The

Dissolution of Character in the Novel”, Brooke-Rose describes how “round characters

seem to have vanished back into fact, into news clips and documentaries, retaining all

their real-life opacity” (191). It is clear from Such’s roster of characters that much of

this scepticism about fiction’s ability to present full personalities is present here as the

roles assumed come secondary to the narrative. The comment that the novel seems to

make on this phenomenon, however, is not so much concerning fiction as a medium

but the nature of personality and the mind. The confusion of the “real” world with its

indeterminable metaphor and inconsistent characters leads the protagonist into the

realm of fantasy where a commitment to logical consistency is no longer demanded.

The role of the “unfinished, unfinishable story” in Such – in terms of both

narrative form and the personal consciousness that the novel seeks to portray – is to

provide a liminal space wherein the confusion of scientific imagery, personal

relationships, and professional knowledge can be dissipated as, distinct from notions

such as truth and authority, the “fantasy” narrative of the self can safely work itself out

without repercussion. In Stories, Theories, and Things, Brooke-Rose describes the

difference between experimental literature and “Nineteenth Century Realism” in terms

of modern literature no longer holding the assumption that “a determinable world,

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pre-existent, external to the fiction and governed by coherent rules… can be materially

transcribed, objectively… and presented as probable according to experience” (208). In

Such the central structuring principle of the main character is the fantasy world

through which his confusions can be worked out. The message is not that all can be

reducible to narrative but that narrative holds a key ordering role that cannot be

replaced by, and should not be confused with, empirically observable and testable

data. Where the languages of Out reinforced systems of domination and alienation,

Such roots these languages into the core of the subject. We may be one step closer to

the discourse-infatuated Brooke-Rose of later texts, but here there remains a central

organising principle of the self; one that is perhaps her closest attempt at reaching a

literature for the “post-Euclidean” quantum-mechanical age.

The next novel in the experimental quartet, 1968’s Between, marks the point at

which a recognisable Brooke-Rose style begins to emerge from the ideas being

developed, although in both conception and consummation there remain distinct

differences when compared to the likes of Amalgamemnon. The novel, with “no plot

worth speaking of”, according to Richard Martin, “confronts the reader with a series of

repetitious monologues… that are uttered between plane journeys, international

congresses, and tourist excursions, in cosmopolitan hotel rooms, and airports” (44).

This narrative, perhaps “not worth speaking of” as a structuring principle, represents a

development from the world-duality of Such in that the “real” space has become

equally liminal here. The life of the intercontinental translator is presented as

simultaneously heterogeneous in its accumulated knowledge of custom, history and

language, whilst overall forming a transnational homogenous mass of temporary

locations.

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 The removal of quotation marks in favour of dashes – a stylistic innovation first

introduced in Out – becomes in this novel a central means of conveying the confusion

of many identities and nameless encounters. Where context made clear who was

speaking even in the fantasy scenes of Such, Brooke-Rose introduces the speakerless

voice in this novel; perhaps an unidentified interlocutor, perhaps internal monologue

or memorised voice. The question of “Who Speaks?” so central to Thru and largely

made redundant in the pure textuality of Amalgamemnon, is here a valid question and

a great cause of tension when it is considered as a structuring factor of a central

character forever moving between unconnected contexts. The development of what

might be called “discourse” in a Foucauldian manner – institutionally exclusive means

of structuring knowledge and consolidating power – has moved beyond the satirical

phase of Out where jargon was presented hyperbolically, past the psychological phase

of Such where it took on metaphysical qualities through metaphor, and into a new

structural phase where identity is both formed and annulled in a maelstrom of

competing signifiers. The tension is no longer between an internal language and an

external, but simply the difficulties of communication under all languages.

The extension of Brooke-Rose’s linguistic experimentation to the inclusion of

other languages is central not only to the construction of this novel about translation,

but to the questions of the Self and privileged discourses that we have seen developed

in the previous two novels. In an interview with Cohen and Hayman, Brooke-Rose

describes her “obligation” to use different languages in terms of “when you see a

Greek truck with the word ‘metaphor’, which of course means transport, and it strikes

you in one way… this, too, is the fusion of discourses” (7). This fusion, central to

Brooke-Rose’s wordplay – “Something gets across. Criss-cross. Crease-crasse? God, verr

god.” (421) – has the dual effect of making strange both the foreign language and the
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mother tongue; on a question of “why you have so many consonants together in

Polish”, for example, the “habit of the eye”, as reading is described, is forced to

reassess the London address of “KNIGHTSBRIDGE” and consider the “GHTSBR, very

terrorising. Also, KN, DG, ten consonants three vowels” (481). The alienating effect

created by foreign language intrusion upon the speaker’s own thought patterns and

languages’ use is emphasised in the constant tendency to reduce nationalities – in

terms of both people and objects – into stereotypes and groupings; the necessity being

the translator’s need to keep the “words flowing into the ear through headphones in

French and down at once out of the mouth into the attached mouthpiece in

simultaneous German” (398). The identity between languages becomes necessarily

empty – the best translator being invisible in the communication process. The “fusion

of discourses” that both the protagonist and to a lesser extent Brooke-Rose herself

attempt to create in Between consists of a total concentration on form; the detrimental

effect that this has upon substance remaining a constant undertone as “the body

floats” (395) through scenes.

In a review of Birch’s study of Brooke-Rose, Flora Alexander describes her

analysis of the Sixties novels as a turn to “metaphor as a structuring principle,

[exploring] processes by which identity is constructed through language” (631). In the

study itself, Birch is far more aware of the complexities of Brooke-Rose’s view of

“metaphor” – incorporating her study, A Grammar of Metaphor, to excellent effect.

However, it is in Alexander’s summary of this argument that the prejudice in favour of

formal analysis that we saw above is most visible. The concept of identity “constructed

through language” certainly becomes a central theme in both Brooke-Rose’s later

works and her theory, yet even the most heavily language-led novel of the Sixties,

Between, seems to carry an almost opposite message: that language can never truly
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serve identity, and that a core of being will forever be exempt from communication. In

this sense, the formal “metaphor” – the transportation of meaning between discourses

through structure – embodies a failure of communication, a patch rather than a bridge.

Rather than revelling in language, the protagonist of Between describes sex as

“circumstances that need no simultaneous interpreting by the codes of zones” (421),

despairs of structural anthropologists seeking “the structure of the imagination itself…

to whose heart did one do that?” (468), and readily admits that “one has to understand

immediately because the thing understood slips away, together with the need to

understand” (468). There is an inner core to Between’s protagonist that the act of

communicating in language does violence to; the body, the imagination, the “thing-in-

itself”, are made secondary by language, categorised and devitalised. The religious

imagery that opens and closes the novel – “between the enormous wings the body

floats” (575) – highlight the transcendent quality of the subject, yet, again, this image is

a metaphor, and one drawn from the monotony of aeroplane transport. Tensions arise

in the contemplation of this space between discourses – the space that, by

transporting language over, metaphor can never truly reach. It is this vitalism, or

perhaps nostalgia for a stable Enlightenment subject, that is one of the central targets

for the poststructuralist project – the radical element of which Brooke-Rose would

meet head-on in the year of Between’s publishing.

Following an uncomfortable start at Vincennes in 1968, a gradual

acclimatisation and then another moment of confusion and disillusion in 1974

(Darlington), the noise and chaos of Brooke-Rose’s Paris experiences eventually find

themselves playing out in a textual war of discourses in 1975’s Thru. Here, however,

there equally emerges a kind of “pure text” that avoids the implied centre of

Between’s protagonist. It is a novel without distinct levels – the narrative of a creative

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writing class simultaneously writing and being written not even appearing in the blurb

– but is rather a multifarious construct of voices, intertexts and technical language.

Notably, the technical language here is that of contemporary literary theory, Brooke-

Rose’s own specialism, suggesting that the mantle of “privileged discourse” framed in

the earlier experimental novels is something she now feels complicit in. In “You Are

Here…”, Glyn White identifies this as a possible reading of the novel; attempting to

“resolve the tensions between being a writer of fiction and becoming deeply involved

with narratology as a teacher” (612).

In terms of critical engagements, Thru appears to be a central text within the

Brooke-Rose canon and, as such, has drawn a number of readings that, whilst not being

directly contradictory, at least point to some of the central contradictions present

within the style of textual analysis favoured when engaging Brooke-Rose’s work. White,

for example, identifies the “whole point of Thru [being] that narrative and language,

the dialogue between text and reader, are inherently stronger and more essential than

criticism” (“You are Here”…, 626). Brooke-Rose herself identified this essential quality

in her 1996 lecture “Remaking” as present in-itself within the text, its language

presenting “almost naïve mimetism of how we act and speak and think at the same

time, without telling ourselves who we are” (4). Meanwhile, making a comparison with

Amalgamemnon, Jean-Jacques Lecercle says the text “communicates in the highest

sense of the term”, allowing us access to the purest form of reception available now

that “we are no longer capable of listening to wretched wandering savages” (169).

From a text that privileges the reader, to a text that privileges the speaker, to a text

that privileges speech – Thru’s highly complex internal structures clearly capture an

aspect of communication unavailable in the majority of texts; a kind of limit-point from

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the excesses of which we can induce meaningful conclusions about language in

general.

In terms of the specific intervention that setting this novel against May ’68

offers, what then does this “pure language” contain within it that might demonstrate

why the subject disappears between Between and Thru? A central aspect of the

decentred narrative can immediately be found in the conflict of discourses which,

unlike earlier texts, here appears not as ways to reach conclusions reinforcing power

structures but rather as part of the university system the point of which, education,

inherently holds no conclusions but equally reinforces a hierarchy of knowledge. On

page 618 (of the Carcanet Omnibus) there appears a treble clef constructed out of

letters reading “revolution”, followed by intertwining circles of letters that make

phrases such as “cruel nails”, “down with strikes”, “capitalistic”, “democratic”, and “the

student body” . That this is introduced by an interchange between a political and an

anti-political voice ending with “in this text everyone has a voice”, means that this

section can both capture the “prise de la parole” spirit that Badiou celebrates whilst

reflecting upon the circular, self-enclosed nature of such discourses within the

academic context. The Brooke-Rose overwhelmed by dogmatic arguments and the

Brooke-Rose tired by the theoretical “games” come together in this image of sound and

fury signifying nothing, going around in circles.

Similarly, Thru contains a number of attacks on women’s liberation, suggesting

that feminist discourse may be at best a superficial rebranding of traditional patriarchal

university practices and at worst a threat to competency and standards. “Larissa” at

one point complains of the “quite abberant” practice of allowing first year students to

study “Black Protest of Women’s Lib” as “the Women’s Lib lot don’t understand a thing

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about deep structures” (635). The practice is said to be “turning this place into a

carnival” – the answer to which is that “it’s a mode of perception as Bakhtin has

shown” (635), according to the male respondent. Equally, “one finds the very same

intellectuals who talk of revolution and endorse black and womens’ lib having as

mistresses young teachers of graduate students who slave willingly” (636) – a

relationship subtly accentuated in the timetable on page 599 featuring “The Inscription

of Protest: Black Literature” taught by “Prof. Littlebrown” and “The Inscription of

Protest: Women’s Lib” taught by “Ms. Littlebrown-Fitzjohn”. The “Ms.” implying the

lack of sufficient qualifications to be known as “Dr.” and the hyphenated surname

suggesting that this has been remedied by the imposition of the superior “Prof.” –

albeit a superior with a diminutive nomenclature. Indeed, in a later interview with

Friedman and Fuchs, Brook-Rose lamented that she was “a bit of an anti-feminist in

those days in the early 1970s”; although it is arguable that this anti-feminism within

the novel forms part of the larger questioning of academic discourses that forms its

core and as such is only one instance of implied hypocrisies undermining a network of

axioms.

The conclusion of the novel suggests a similar state of hypocrisy implicit within

literary studies itself. Following a long list of “students” being marked for their creative

writing efforts – these students including “Sade, Marquis de”, “Sand, George”, “Moses”,

“Doyle, Conan” (740), and the like – there is, amongst a jumble of letters readable in a

number of directions, the description of literary studies as “learning to be a parasite

upon a text nobody reads passed on from generation to generation” as the readership

“dwindles to a structured elite more or less textivore” (741). The image is one of a total

renunciation of the possibilities that May ’68 saw for university education; the “canon”

will remain, only changing as the different contributors are “marked” by new
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academics and placed accordingly, all the while a “structured elite” will dominate these

discourses being, as they are, beyond the consideration of earthly satiation and fed

only on text. The image is practically Swiftian and certainly suggests that if there is a

consistent “core” to this text it is no longer a subject but rather a satirical target with a

history going back to Rabelais.

So how does this satirical attitude impact the novel as a “pure text”? The

directness of the communication in Thru no doubt relates largely to the self-referential

attitude imbued in the narrative’s construction. Although there is no B.S. Johnson-

esque author figure visibly manipulating the text, there is nevertheless a cavalier

attitude to “round characters” and their construction. The two returning voices of the

novel, “Armel Santores” and “Larissa Toren”, are demonstrated to be anagrammatical

“except for ME in hers and I in his” (647) – the same page swiftly moving into an

intertextual appearance from “Jacques” of Diderot’s subtly self-reflexive Jacques the

Fatalist as if to confirm the reader’s intuition that an author is making their presence

felt here. Equally, an attempt at a romantic scene collapses as “the castle seemed

momentarily to be French. And yet you have drunk Slovene wine and referred to the

count as a latin lover type” (693) – another voice then entering to suggest that

“perhaps you had better set the scene in Mexico” (694), which in turn provokes an

argument regarding a suitable geographical location for castles, counts and latin lovers

to all be present simultaneously. The pulp-romance genre qualities of the scene imply

that such an empirical discussion is perhaps an unsuitable response; the reader(s) are

intended to suspend their critical faculties in a similar manner as they must when

taking “Armel” and “Larissa” to be distinct entities rather than the creation of an

author. In a sense, then, Thru’s satirical target is equally the people reading as the

anonymous hypocrite academics caricatured in its discourses. What this moment in

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Brooke-Rose’s career suggests, then, is that much of the implicit importance of

innovation – the sense of potential central to the experimental approach – has been

replaced by a cynicism that is nevertheless humorous and ludic. Exhaustion is

overcome by joviality; something that, once met with misreadings on publication, it is

easy to suppose would lead Brooke-Rose’s retreat into criticism that followed. All the

feelings of disillusion that Brooke-Rose displays on the few occasions that she looks

back to her early years at Vincennes in Remake are already visibly present in Thru

alongside the lingering enthusiasm that ends up sublimated into theory.

What is not present in Thru, however, at least to the extent to which it is later

projected back into it, is any Baudrillardian/Lyotardian denial of the existence of truths.

This “high postmodernist” attitude, one earlier identified as occurring in relation to a

historical moment occurring much later than either the writing or the publication of

Thru, and explicitly denied in Brooke-Rose’s Sixties cosmology notes, certainly makes

appearances in later texts, and it is for this reason that it is so commonly identified in

this novel; a text that is in many ways a blueprint for those texts. Backwards projection

is a habit that Brooke-Rose may be conscious of – the title of Remake suggests such

awareness – but this nevertheless doesn’t stop her from implying that her

postmodernism can be predated to her code-breaking work in the war when she

stopped reading the papers “out of fear of being unable to distinguish inside from

outside information [and thus] to be sure everything known is secret” (108). Needless

to say, it would be a dubious academic argument to find the genesis of Thru in

Bletchley Park, but I would argue that there are similar dangers in recuperating the text

as a proponent of later postmodernisms when its origins lie more firmly in the late

(Long) Sixties radical atmosphere and its subsequent disillusions.

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 Ann Jefferson, in her 1980 monograph The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of

Fiction writes that “there are two different kinds of interpretation concerning the

nature and relevance of [the genre’s new conception of] formal realism”; one by which

formal innovation “mirrors the organisation of the society in which it is produced” and

“another which assumes that it mirrors the structure and patterns of human

consciousness” (3). As we have seen, when considering the experimental period of

Brooke-Rose such an argument presents a false dichotomy. The very task of relating

human consciousness and the form of the novel through which this mimesis takes

place is directly related to the organisation of society and the ideological discourses

through which it perpetuates itself. For Brooke-Rose, in an essay contributing to the

collection Reconstructing Individualism, “the society that the novel was developed to

study and depict has lost all solid basis, stability, and belief in itself” and as a result

“our vision of it has broken up into fragments” (189). The reconfiguration of the novel

in order to account for this new fragmentary reality may have at its core an impulse to

individuation but, for a writer as structurally minded as Brooke-Rose, the neglect of

social organisation would be the first step towards failure. The recuperated

postmodern vision of absolute detachment does considerable violence to the meaning

of these texts when it is retrospectively applied to them. Hopefully, positioning these

novels historically will help to salvage the novels where they have become submerged

in the sea of text.

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Thesis Conclusion

By reading the five experimental writers addressed in this thesis against their historical context

we not only open new routes into understanding each, but also trace a critically neglected line

of potential development within the history of British literature. The experimental novelists of

the Long Sixties present a distinctly British approach to innovation against a prevailing

conservativism. Such approaches are clearly distinct and at times opposite to the combination

of continental philosophy and detached irony which came to prominence within Western

literary culture in the 1980s. A shared “experimental” identity is instead mapped through

notions of commitment, both to social concerns and to the importance (or, more rightly, the

perceived necessity) of formal innovation.

Returning to the group of “experimental” novelists after addressing each writer’s

contributions individually it can be seen how each writer emphasises an aspect of a shared

culture. B.S. Johnson’s anxieties about his class identity are rooted in the shifting social

structures of the Sixties, and illuminate not only the experience of writers of a similar class

position, like Ann Quin, but all those subject to such social upheaval. Eva Figes’ wartime

experiences may have surpassed most in terms of the personal trauma involved, but her

writing exposes the shared traumas rooted in British culture twenty years after the end of the

world conflict. Politically, Figes reacts against this memory, looking forward to some future

moment of liberation from both the militaristic patriarchal society of the past and the lingering

spectres of an ancestral patriarchal memory. The experimental novelists’ assault upon old

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forms and structures is most pronounced in the work of Alan Burns. In his cut-ups we see how

far an experimental novelist can break with established tradition while still remaining firmly

cemented within their sociocultural moment; undermining complacency while presenting

alternative materialist practices. Ann Quin pushes out the boundaries of form beyond the page

and into life itself; transversing mediums and consciousnesses on a route towards an

experimental mode of Being in its fullest sense. The outlier of the grouping, Christine Brooke-

Rose, also points us towards an experimental break with Victorian form. Her commitment to

revolutionising the novel that it might approach an already-scientifcally-revolutionised

contemporary experience presents its own valuable contribution to British experimentalism

while also demonstrating how such a trajectory could eventually lead to the postmodern. Each

writer benefits from the experiments of the others, and only together does some immanent

meaning become palpable within their collective work. As much as each writer had their own

vision of the novel’s future, together these visions express a collective striving towards

innovation, a sincerity of purpose, and a faith in the power of cultural forms to change the

world. To the cynical postmodern eye such a project could not possibly last, but for a short

while in the Long Sixties it drove the work of not only one, but a group of British writers.

In taking this cultural formation as a legitimate literary grouping – the argument for

which has been the overarching project of this thesis – we can then look to how this grouping

differs from other academically-acknowledged “groups” of writers. The key differentiating

factors are twofold. Firstly, these writers may pose the only dominant literary avant garde in

modern British history without a membership the majority of which were educated in elite

institutions. Secondly, the shared conception of the novel as a physical object capable of

altering readers’ thought-patterns represents a materialist politics of aesthetics

underappreciated by current literary scholarship. Both aspects no doubt contribute to the

critical undervaluing of these writers by their contemporaneous literary Establishment and

subsequent theoretically-guided reassessments of the canon. Yet where these traits have

historically been a weakness, through a thorough and sympathetic analysis of these writers in

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context these aspects can be framed as their core strengths. It is the task of academic recovery

to uncover alternative cultural trajectories lost to competing histories. These writers offer an

example of an avant garde that is not traditionally “elite”, two factors which are so often

synonymous in British culture. Outside of this Establishment, their innovations could break so

far with recognised critical traditions that only now, fifty years later, has a critical language

emerged sufficient to unpack conceptually their contributions to literature.

It is my hope that the new research presented in this thesis furthers understanding of

British experimental literature and addresses many of the historical imbalances involved in

discussions of “experimentalism”. As reading technologies advance and the presence of the

book is again a subject of critical debate, it may be that the experiments of fifty years ago can

be seen as of vital importance once more. In conducting new experiments, writers will do well

to heed the message which each of these Sixties writers sought to convey in their projects, as

different as they were from each other in practice; that form is political, and something that

must be taken seriously if it is to effect change. Similarly, as academics begin to give these

writers long due critical attention as distinct authors, the insight we gain into each individual

deepens and broadens our understanding of the collective just as the collective is only ever

realised in the individual.

268
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August, 1999. Web. 5th March, 2013.

Figures

Figure 1: Ngram search for term “experimental literature”

Figure 2: Ngram search for terms “Groovy” and “Space Age”

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Figure 3: Pages 110 and 111 of Alan Burns’ Dreamerika

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Figure 4: Pages 618 and 619 of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru (The Carcanet Omnibus
edition)

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Figure 5: Pages 88 and 89 of B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo

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Figure 6: Ngram search for term “The Establishment”

291
Figure 7: Tables from Lowe (pg. 286)

Figure 8: Table from Short (pg. 30)

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Figure 9: Graph from Short (pg. 224)

Figure 10: Table from Sampson (pg. 196)

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Figure 11: Table from Willatt (pg. 11)

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Figure 12: Graph from Harvey (pg. 146)

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Figure 13:

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