Conclusion

Instead of tackling the question or the problem head on, directly, straightforwardly, which would doubtless be impossible, inappropriate, or illegitimate, should we proceed obliquely? (Jacques Derrida1) As ever, no preplanning, stumbled into it—my fundamental creative method—trial and error—tried it out, scribbled down ‘A policeman called Lilian’—liked it—added more, yeah, fantastic ...

Realism, Truth, and Error in the Writing of B. S. Johnson

Over the last decade or so in particular, B. S. Johnson has come to represent an exemplar of the 1960s and early 1970s experimental tendency for readers and scholars alike. His complex relation to realism is here examined, and the chapter shows the connections between this and his writing’s tonal and affective cast, proposing the centrality of anxiety, and preoccupation with the body. This recurs throughout his work as a corporeal proximity that scrambles the distance between subject and object. The errancy identified as so key to the experimental novel of the period is central: Johnson’s texts worry at themselves, both in what they depict and in their ability to depict it at all. This chapter shows how his novels register an emerging aesthetic of failure, whereby the productive potential of error allows the experimental novel to negotiate and to expand the contested categories of realism and late modernism.

Accident as Event

Dealing with a broad sweep of experimental novels of the period that make accident a central concern, this chapter examines writing by Samuel Beckett, Brigid Brophy, Eva Figes, Gabriel Josipovici, Nicholas Mosley, Muriel Spark, and Stefan Themerson. In these the accident emerges as a thematic motif or philosophical principle: as chronological paralysis, traumatic violence, revelatory or epiphanic understanding, or eroticized encounter with technology. In late modernism, the uneasy mingling of the precariousness induced by an awareness of life as threatened by the atomic as well as constituted by it seems contradictory to an understanding of the accident as inevitable. This is prevalent in Beckett’s invocation of the void as much as in the frantic figurations of a writer like Brophy. The accident then emerges as what reveals the late modernist disposition to passivity, non-mastery, dissolution, and silence, pushing at the limits of what can and cannot be known.

Accident as Critique

This chapter turns from reading the accidental and uncertain nature of British post-war avant-gardism as constitutive of its status as late, to asking the question, late to whom? Lateness clearly implies a particular relation to history, and assumes an emergence from a particular tradition, in this instance Western and modernist. What does it mean to conceive of this form of writing—the accidental, the experimental, the uncertain—in the period as new, that is, in terms of the anglophone modernist tradition? The particular historical trajectories of Britain’s colonial past, and the dissolution of its empire, combined to mean that in the 1950s and 1960s some of the most innovative writers were migrants. This chapter accordingly asks how this argument thus far might be extended by thinking about how the specifically postcolonial historical moment is illuminated by their (partial, or perceived) refusal of realism, taking as its examples the experimentalists Zulfikar Ghose and Denis Williams.

Accident as Form

This chapter argues for the 1960s and 1970s collage novel as perhaps the clearest manifestation of the period’s attraction to indeterminacy, and attempts to chart some of the often artistically inspired cross-currents that inform some of the experimental novels of the period. The chapter examines Alan Burns’s 1969 Babel, also touching on Tom Phillips’s ‘dispersed narrative’ A Humument (begun in 1966), and J. G. Ballard’s 1970 Atrocity Exhibition. These works share as central concerns juxtaposition and formal discontinuity, whereby an idea of errancy is sculptural and generative, allowed its own narrative presence and formal ordering power. As such these texts display an interest in the mechanisms of dispersed attention as an aesthetic value—a certain skittishness assumed in the reader—and so these contingencies of production and consumption become constitutive of the genre, and folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself.

Alexander Trocchi, Tom McCarthy, and Late, Late Modernism

The accidental and the errant have so far been suggested as formal and philosophical principles in the experimental writing of the British post-war scene. Accordingly, late modernism has here been understood as more than a periodizing hypothesis or a chronological marker; rather, it is distinctively late because it is accidental. This final chapter will read Alexander Trocchi alongside Tom McCarthy, as a novelist who explicitly writes in the tradition of the post-war avant-garde, and read both in the light of the idea of the atomic swerve or clinamen. The chapter argues that the novel form becomes imbricated in questions of whether rupture might supervene its own representation. Both writers’ late modernist tasks become entangled with writing’s more fundamental relation to accident, event, error, and traumatic or chronologically scrambled repetition.

Accidental Subjects, or Ann Quin’s Literature of Possibility

Ann Quin is often painted as an isolated and rebarbative voice, more influenced by the nouveau roman than by any of her peers. Her novels display to various degrees a narrative capacity for waiting, lingering, doing nothing, and for silence. This chapter links the notions of latency and unrealized possibility in her fiction to her dissolution of the subject. Her characters are defined by their hazy lack of definition, which this chapter will link to the ways in which she thinks people, and, relatedly, objects, are and are not used. Her texts refuse utility of all kinds; so do her characters, and so do her things. This chapter therefore argues that Quin’s attraction to the microscopic and phenomenological, her formal elevation of uncertainty into a narrative device, and her philosophically informed decentring of the subject, make her one of the most significant avant-garde figures of the period.

Oblique Strategies and Experimental Fictions

The writers that are the subject of this book have begun to assume increasing importance, gaining in readership, scholarly attention, and critical significance. Yet it has not so far been possible to understand their tonal and formal particularity in its full relation to late modernism, which has recently been defined less as a periodizing hypothesis and more as a distinctive set of aesthetic and philosophical concerns of its own. In this introductory chapter, Oblique Strategies proposes a new reading of these writers, as not merely defined by certain formal effects, including the self-consciously opaque or abstruse, the non-linear, jump-cut, or typographically virtuosic, but arguing that this particular strain of late modernism is best understood as constituted by their thematic and philosophical concern with accident and indeterminacy. Here the book makes the case for these writers’ collective sense of themselves as writing modernist fiction after modernism, with all the belatedness, uncertainty, and paradoxical urgency—aesthetic, philosophical, and stylistic—that obtains.

Indeterminate Brooke-Rose

Christine Brooke-Rose is more often thought of in terms of constraint than indeterminacy, due to her decision to write most of her novels under certain rules of exclusion or grammatical limitation, a decision which means that her work is often determined, in particular ways, before she starts writing. But it is largely against this notion of constraint that this chapter reads her 1966 novel Such, and her writing more generally, as ‘indeterminate’. This chapter will use this term not only to indicate that Brooke-Rose is engaged with a particular kind of scientific discourse about uncertainty and indeterminacy, but also as a way to read her figurative imagination. Indeterminacy evokes both epistemic ambiguity and a muddy opacity, and Such, without itself being formally indeterminate ‘as such’, offers us a vision of what a sense of unconstraint might do elsewhere: to human relations, to epistemology, and to the human subject.