The Post-War Experimental Novel

British and French Fiction, 1945-75

Andrew Hodgson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350226234
• eBook ISBN: 9781350076860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Delving into how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed – or perhaps malformed – the post-war experimental novel, this book explores how the symbolic violence of post-war normalization warped societies' perception of reality. Andrew Hodgson explores how the novel was used by authors to attempt to communicate in such a climate, building a memorial space that has been omitted from literatures and societies of the post-war period. Hodgson investigates this space as it is portrayed in experimental modern British and French fiction, considering themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia. Such themes are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take – books in boxes; of spare pages to be shuffled at the reader's will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink. Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and legitimizes the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.

Notes

Preface

1Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865) (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), pp. 15–16.

2Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 10.

3Conroy Maddox, “Poem” (written 1941; exhibited 1986), The Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight (Manchester: Carcanet, 2013), p. 125.

Partition One

1Depending on the critical, cultural tradition, or a specific critic’s perspective, as an epistemic epoch this might be clarified to the ‘late-modern’, or ‘mid-modern’, for the particular vaguely nineteenth century to vaguely twentieth century period of time that is ‘artistically’ here described in active ‘modernity’ (not to speak of the current critical turn towards the prefixing of ‘long’). And yet these ism constructs appear to dominate any and all of these epochal ‘literary modern(/ity)’ constructs.

2James Clements, Mysticism and the Mid-Century Novel (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), p 1.

3Ibid.

4Peter Brooker, ‘Introduction: Reconstructions’, Modernism/Postmodernism (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 1–33. p. 4.

5Ibid.

6Ibid.

7Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 48–9.

8Frank Kermode, ‘Modernisms’, Continuities (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 1–32. p. 28.

9The new scholarly designation of a ‘modernist’ as a researcher of a specific field of, assumedly, ‘modernism’, would appear to favour a 1920ish classification.

10Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 10–11.

11Brooker, p. 4.

12David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Blackwell, 1991), p. ii.

13Ibid., p. iii.

14Ibid., p. 3.

15Ibid., p. 10.

16Ibid., p. 9.

17Ihab Hassan, ‘The Culture of Postmodernism’, Theory, Culture and Society, 2, 3, Fall 1985, pp. 119–31. p. 123.

18Brooker, p. 11.

19Ibid., p. 14.

20Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second dégre (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 290.

21Harvey, p. 356.

22Jago Morrison, Contemporary Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2003), p 3.

23Members of the Oulipo at large, and in particular Georges Perec regularly denounced Robbe-Grillet as narcissistic or obscurant. Roland Topor writes of Robbe-Grillet’s ‘nouveaux romans’ as ‘a complaisant self-portrait of the artist’: Roland Topor, ‘Preface’ (1990), in Daniel Spoerri, Topographie anécdotée* du hasard (1962) (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), pp. i–ii.

24Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1992), p. xx.

25In speaking of Dostoevsky and Kafka, Sarraute highlights the inadequacies of such a ‘baton-passing’ image of literary history; counter to Johnson’s application.

26B.S. Johnson, Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? in Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson, eds. Philip Tew, Julia Jordan, Jonathan Coe (London: Picador, 2013), pp. 1–140. p. 30.

27Genette, Palimpsestes, p. 291.

28Clements, p. 1.

29Ibid.

30Ibid.

31Alain Badiou, ‘The Three Negations’, Cardozo Law Review, vol. 29:5, 2008, pp. 1877–83. p. 1880.

32Marshall Berman, ‘The Twentieth Century: The Halo and the Highway’, Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 74–81. p. 80.

33Helena Bassil-Morozow, ‘On the Reality of the Shadow’, The IAJS Shadow Online Seminar http://jungstudies.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IAJS-Onlin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Partition One – Motive: The Sense Something is Missing
• Partition Two – Diagnoses: The Confused Narrative of the Post-War Human
• Partition Three – Treatment: Breaking Down Within the Horizon of the Real
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright