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Contextualising British Experimental Novelists in the Long Sixties

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Contextualising British Experimental Novelists in the Long Sixties 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
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