Contextualising British Experimental Novelists in the Long Sixties

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 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 1^st 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 18^th 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 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” (28^th 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 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,

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.

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 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.

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 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… 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 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 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.

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 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).

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.