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When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full thesis title", University of Southampton, name of the University School or Department, PhD Thesis, pagination http://eprints.soton.ac.uk UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON Faculty of Humanities English Tracing the Ethical Dimension of Postwar British Experimental Fiction by Chris Clarke Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2015 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON ABSTRACT FACULTY OF HUMANITIES English Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy TRACING THE ETHICAL DIMENSION OF POSTWAR BRITISH EXPERIMENTAL FICTION Chris Fraiser Clarke This thesis examines the treatment of failure in the experimental fiction of Alan Burns, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson and Ann Quin in order to reconsider their work’s faltering relationship to postwar British culture. The thesis reassesses the significance of failure in these authors’s experimental fiction by drawing on Ewa Ziarek’s analysis of the affiliation between modernism’s aesthetics of failure and the deconstruction of scepticism. Following Ziarek, it reads failure in the experimental texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin through the lenses of the philosophical revision of scepticism and of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other to argue that we can rethink these novelists’s haunting relationship to postwar British culture by tracing their works’s ethical dimension. This methodology allows for a critical reinterpretation of the relationship between these experimental fiction writers and the postwar British public as it was imagined by a key supporter and funder of their work – the Arts Council of Great Britain. Though the Arts Council’s subsidization of postwar culture enabled the production of these experimental fictions, this thesis suggests that it also inhibited their modes of articulation through its subtle marshalling of the norms and conventions of the public, and thereby contributed to a tendency to misrecognize the significance of failure in these authors’s works. The first chapter introduces Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin by sketching their fleeting formation as a group in the late nineteen-sixties, and their relationship to the Arts Council. The chapter then elaborates on the thesis’s methodology by exploring how a sense of failure also haunted Raymond Williams and Doris Lessing’s attempts to rethink the relationship between culture and community in postwar Britain. The chapters that follow focus in turn on texts by Figes, Johnson, Burns, and Quin in order to outline the relationship of their work to different discursive communities and to devise new ways to read the ethical significance of failure in their experimental fictions. As a whole, the thesis argues that a rereading of failure in the texts of Burns, Figes, Johnson and Quin can shed light on the lasting legacy of experimental writing in postwar British culture. Table of Contents Table of Contents ............................................................................................................. i DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP ......................................................................... iii Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... v Introduction: Failure and Postwar British Experimental Fiction .............................. 1 1. Experimental Fiction and the Postwar Public Sphere ............................................. 7 ‘Writers Reading’ and the Arts Council’s Cultural Community .................................. 7 Failure and Community in Postwar Experimental Fiction ......................................... 18 2. ‘Poetry of the Inarticulate’: The Survival of Eva Figes’s Early Experimental Fiction ............................................................................................................ 37 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 37 Figes’s Cultural Writings and the Postwar Literary Scene ........................................ 39 The Feminist Counterpublic and the Mainstream in B ............................................... 47 ‘Writers Reading’ and the Nouveau Roman .............................................................. 49 Postwar German-Jewish Survivors and Figes’s ‘Poetry of the Inarticulate’ .............. 52 Konek Landing ........................................................................................................... 57 3. ‘Allornothinger’: Quivers of Truths in the Experimental Fiction of B. S. Johnson ........................................................................................................................ 67 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 67 Identities of B. S. Johnson’s Truth-Telling in the Postwar Public Sphere ................. 70 The Failure of Truth-Telling in Albert Angelo and The Unfortunates ....................... 82 The Unfortunates ........................................................................................................ 89 4. ‘A Sort of Nervous Charge’: Disconnection and National Culture in Alan Burns’s Cut-Up Texts ................................................................................... 99 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 99 Burns’s Experimental Poetics, the Public and English Culture ............................... 102 Failure and Radical Forms of Protest in The Angry Brigade and Palach ................ 111 Burns’s Cut-Up Technique and Witold Gombrowicz’s Dissolution of Form .......... 115 Dislocations of the Public in Europe After the Rain and Celebrations .................... 119 i 5. ‘Trailed Through Minds of Her Time’: Disorientations of the Public in Ann Quin’s Experimental Fiction ..................................................................... 133 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 133 Quin and the Public .................................................................................................. 135 Speechless in Public ................................................................................................. 139 Berg ........................................................................................................................ 146 The Death of the Moth ............................................................................................. 150 Disorientations of the Public in Three and Passages ............................................... 153 Conclusion: Postwar Experimental Fiction, Modernism and Postmodernism ..... 167 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 175 ii DECLARATION OF AUTHORSHIP I, Chris Clarke declare that this thesis and the work presented in it are my own and has been generated by me as the result of my own original research. Tracing the Ethical Dimension of Postwar British Experimental Fiction I confirm that: This work was done wholly or mainly while in candidature for a research degree at this University; Where any part of this thesis has previously been submitted for a degree or any other qualification at this University or any other institution, this has been clearly stated; Where I have consulted the published work of others, this is always clearly attributed; Where I have quoted from the work of others, the source is always given. With the exception of such quotations, this thesis is entirely my own work; I have acknowledged all main sources of help; Where the thesis is based on work done by myself jointly with others, I have made clear exactly what was done by others and what I have contributed myself; None of this work has been published before submission: Signed: Date: iii Acknowledgements This thesis was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Block Grant Partnership award. I would like to thank the AHRC for their financial support. I am grateful for the permission to include material from the following sources: St Louis, Washington University Libraries, Olin Library, Robert Sward Papers, MSS110; Stanford, Stanford University Libraries, Robert Creeley Papers, 1950-1997 M0662. In addition, I would like to thank Elaine Andrews at Morley College Library for providing me with the copies of More. This work has been made possible by the teaching in the English Department at the University of Southampton. I would like to thank the following people for their teaching and encouragement: David Glover, Marianne O’Doherty, Stephen Morton, Stephanie Jones, and the late Julie Campbell. I am particularly grateful to Will May for introducing me to postwar British experimental fiction, and