Amongst Those Left (British Literature) - Softcover

Booth, Francis

9781628972788: Amongst Those Left (British Literature)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628972785 ISBN 13: 9781628972788

Verlag: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020

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Amongst Those Left is a long-overdue study of experimental literature in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1980s.

Undertaken with the aim of refuting the idea that "while American and French fiction was exciting and groundbreaking, British novels were all dull, realist, and provincial," Booth’s book takes us on a tour through the captivating work of such writers as Ann Quin, Eva Figes, Stevie Smith, Nicholas Mosley, Christine Brooke-Rose, Stefan Themerson, B. S. Johnson, Anna Kavan, J. G. Ballard, and many, many others. In doing so, Booth effectively reimagines the twentieth-century literary landscape of Britain. Amongst Those Left is sure to add a few books to your reading list and considerably expand your library.

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Francis Booth is also the author of Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America, 1926–1939, Stranger Still: The Works of Anna Kavan, and 1922: The Making of the Modern He has translated Maurice Maeterlinck’s marionette plays and several Buddhist and Hindu works, some of which have been set to music. He is also the author of many volumes of poetry, which are collected in The Storyteller’s Assistant: Collected Words, 2005–2011.

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Absurdity is a strong theme in American postmodernism, as is the feeling of apocalypse: Walker Percy has said of one of his novels that what seemed important to him were ‘certain elements of self-hatred and self-destructiveness which have surfaced in American life . . . This accounts for the apocalyptic themes of the book: love in the ruins, end of the world, being among the few survivors etc.’ Given these themes, the traditional notion of character is also rejected. Hawkes says: ‘I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme’; and Ronald Sukenick: ‘I don’t think the kind of books I’m interested in are interested in characterisation anymore’, and: ‘The contemporary writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality doesn’t exist.’ Hawkes also is prepared to bracket the whole of existence: I can’t help but think of fictions as artefacts created out of always the nothingness and always pointing toward that source of zero, a sort of zero source. That is why for one reason among others I admire John Barth, because the more elaborate the fiction gets, the more you create, the more you know exactly the nothingness it inhabits.

Barth himself tells ‘complicated stories simply for the aesthetic pleasure of complexity, of complication and unravelment, suspense and the rest’; John Gardner, who thinks that Walt Disney, apart from his sentimentality, was one of the greatest American artists, and tries in his work to create ‘cartoon’ characters (he praises Stanley Elkin for doing the same), is similarly interested in telling stories for their own sake: ‘What you have to do, I think, is tell an interesting story. That means a plot that’s kind of neat and that’s got characters who are kind of neat and it happens in places that are made by the writer’s imagination into ‘kind of neat . . . That’s what I think fiction now is about. It’s about, creating circus shows.’ William Gass has stated his preference for the formal over the empirical, a preference shared by many other novelists: when asked if he ever did research for his novels he replied:

No research. I collect words. Twelve different names for whore among the Romans. Thirty five names for cloth and silk stuffs. Etc. Sometimes I even use what I’ve collected. Or an old book will suggest something. But there are no ‘scenes’ to revisit . . . because my choice of factuality . . . was purely formal

Similarly John Hawkes has said: ‘I resist and resent very much the idea of associating research with fiction writing. It seems to me a bizarre incongruity to even think of researching something which is real in order to create a fiction which is a fiction’. The fictionality of fiction and its inability to reflect reality is echoed by Donald Barthelme: ‘Art is not about something but is something’, and by Gilbert Sorrentino: ‘The novel must exist outside the life it deals with; it is an invention, something that is made; it is not the expression of ‘self’; it does not mirror reality’. Sukenick also expresses a similar view: ‘Rather than serving as a mirror or redoubling on itself, fiction adds itself to the world, creating a meaningful ‘reality’ that did not previously exist’.

This ‘reality’ is seen by these novelists to be purely a verbal one; William Gass has said: ‘That novels should be made of words and only words is a bit shocking really. It is as though you had discovered that your wife was made of rubber .’ Gass’s professed concern is ironic, as is shown by another comment: ‘the novelist, if he is any good will keep us kindly imprisoned in his language – there is literally nothing beyond’. On similar lines, Raymond Federman has written:

fiction can no longer be reality or a representation of reality, or an imitation, or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY - an autonomous reality whose only relation with the real world is to improve that world. To create fiction is, in fact, a way to abolish reality, and especially to abolish the notion that reality is truth

Federman, in an insert in his novel Double or Nothing, which is titled ‘Some Reflections on the Novel in Our Time’, also says:

the novel is nothing but a denunciation, by its very reality, of the illusion which animates it. All great novels are critical novels which, under the pretense of telling a story, of bringing characters to life, of interpreting situations, slide under our eyes the mirage of a tangible form . . . The essence of a literary discourse - that is to say a discourse fixed once and for all - is to find its own point of reference, its own rules of organisation in itself, and not in the real or imaginary experience on which it rests.

Stanley Elkin has also emphasised the purely verbal aspect of his work: when asked what he liked most about it he replied: What I like best about it, I suppose, are the sentences.’ And Gerald Graft has also noted that postmodernist writers and their critics ‘have taken as their subject the problematic status of their own authority to make statements about anything outside the systems of language and convention in which they must write’. No wonder a 1970s book about the American novel was called City of Words. All these comments point towards a rejection of the traditional liberal humanist basis of the novel. As Malcolm Bradbury has put it:

the model of a cybernetic world has led to an art in which the human figure exists itself as a parody - as a role-player, a formless performer, a cardboard cut-out. From this, we may draw a dark conclusion: that many modern writers feel they can yield to us only a post-humanist model of man.

The American critic Leslie Fiedler does not see this conclusion as being dark at all; he sees post-humanism as the goal towards which the youth of America are striving, not as something which is being foisted on them by novelists: ‘the tradition from which they strive to disengage is the tradition of the human, as the West . . . has defined it, Humanism itself’. Ihab Hassan, one of the leading apologists for and theorists of postmodernism comes to the same conclusion, though he seems more ambivalent about it: ‘We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something we must helplessly call posthumanism.’ The avant garde American novel and its apologists seem therefore to have abandoned the liberal humanist viewpoint and realist aesthetic which have traditionally characterised the novel, and the post-war French novel seems also to have moved towards post-humanism.

Immediately after the Second World War, John Lehmann, visiting Paris, noted that France’s intellectual vitality was as remarkable as ever, but it seemed to me to a large extent to be turning in a void. Whether it was the result of the shock of defeat and the humiliation of Nazi occupation, or of some deeper reason that went further back, the dominant spirit was, I thought, anti-humanistic, even nihilistic. And, of course, the postwar French novel had the influence of such figures as Radiguet, Roussel, Queneau and Blaise Cendrars as well as the influence of Dada and Surrealism at a time when the British novel was turning away from Modernism. The French also had the impetus of Existentialism to add to the heritage of Symbolism, a tradition of stylistic innovation and refinement extending back at least as far as Flaubert’s desire to write a novel about nothing, and the example of a series of mostly misanthropist writers rejecting and reviling bourgeois humanist values, extending, at least, through de Sade, Lautr�amont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, C�line and Genet.

The French nouveau roman, while it has many differences from the American postmodernist novel, has generally...

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